nr summer 2012

N ieman Reports summer 2012 VOL. 66 NO. 2

MEDIASOCIALTRUTH

@NiemanReports How journalists today expose manipulations and find reliable voices in the crowd #NRtruth

The NiemaN FouNdaTioN FoR JouRNalism aT haRvaRd uNiveRsiTy To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

IN THE AGE OF

in This issue

4 a New age for Truth Fasterdistribution,moreplatforms,andagreaterroleforaccuracy.By Craig Silverman

7 detecting the Truth in Photos Howanewsserviceverifiesimagesandvideos.By Santiago Lyon

10 inside the BBC’s verification hub Technologyandhumanintuitionarekey.By David Turner

14 Finding the Wisdom in the Crowd Storyfulhelpsnewsorganizationsverifysocialmedia.By Mark Little

17 vetting Citizen Journalism CNN’siReportdrawsonnewsgatherersworldwide.By Lila King

19 doubting amina Thelessonsinacaseofinventedidentity.By Jillian York

21 Challenging ‘he said, she said’ Journalism Doeseverystoryreallyhavetwosides?By Linda Greenhouse

25 Be Careful Who you Quote AninterviewwithWashingtonethicswatchdogMelanieSloan.By Stefanie Friedhoff

28 Taking on the Rumor mill Sortingfactfromfictioninrealtimeafteratornado.By Katherine K. Lee

30 The story That Rocked the Clock Anewspaperadaptstoa24-hournewscycle.By Phil Brinkman

Cover Story: Truth in the Age Of Social Media

in an attempt to get the news out first, CNN got it wrong. minutes after the u.s. supreme Court handed down its decision on the health care law in June, CNN erroneously tweeted and reported on-air that the law’s individual mandate had been struck down. Fox News also incorrectly reported on the ruling. Bloomberg News, The associated Press, and others got it right within the same time frame.

32 AftertheShouting,BridgingtheDivide Arethepastcrimesofvictimsfairgame?By Margaret Sullivan

35 FindingStrengthinNumbers Learningtominedatapaysoff.By John Diedrich

36 PhotoEssay:ThisLandIsTheirLand ExploitingLatinAmerica’snaturalriches.By Gustavo Jononovich

44 ChaosTheory Howanonlinepioneerviewsthefuture.By Richard Gingras

Features

In Every Issue

Fromleft:MargaretSullivan,page32,photo by Derek Gee/The Buffalo News;oilpipelineinEcuador,page36,photo by Gustavo Jononovich;RichardGingras,page44,photo by Lisa Abitbol.

3 From thE curator By Ann Marie Lipinski

soundIng46 CoverStories Abookcriticinpraiseofthe

counter-narrative.By Megan O’Grady

books48 SecretsandLies “RyszardKapuscinski:ALife”by ArturDomoslawski. Reviewed by Paul Salopek

50 TheFightofHisLife “EdKennedy’sWar”editedbyJulia

KennedyCochran.Reviewed by Bill Schiller

52 Mr.Difficult “MikeWallace:ALife”byPeter

Rader.Reviewed by Stuart Watson

53 nIEman notEs Plus2013FellowsandBingham,

Taylor,Lukas,andPulitzerprizes.

67 nIEman JournalIsm lab

68 hEard at lIppmann housE

VoL.66No.2 SuMMER2012

Megano’Grady.Photo by Thorsten Trimpop.

2Nieman Reports |Summer2012

NIEMANREPoRTSTHENIEMANFouNDATIoNFoRJouRNALISMATHARVARDuNIVERSITywww.niemanreports.orgVoL. 66 No. 2 SUMMER 2012

“�Why�is�it�just�so�difficult�to�make��the�search�for�truth�the�highest�journalistic�value?”—LINDAGREENHouSE,PAGE21

PuBLISHERAnnMarieLipinski

CoNTRIBuTINGEDIToRStefanieFriedhoff

ASSISTANTEDIToRJanGardner

EDIToRIALASSISTANTJonathanSeitz

DESIGN2CoMMuNIqué

[email protected]

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Nieman Reports |Summer2012 3

FRoMTHECuRAToR

A recent blog post on Mashable explored designer OliverReichenstein’ssuggestionsforcorrectingerrorsonTwitter.Itwasillustratedwithaquaintpieceofart:aphoto-graphoflinedwritingpaperandaredpencil,eraserenddown,retractingtheword“Error.”

“Twitteriscelebratedforrapidlydistributingbreakingnews,sometimesreachingvastaudiencesbeforethatinformationisreportedbythepress,”wroteLaurenIndvik.“Butsometimesthatinformationisinaccurate…anditcanbedifficulttocorrectonceit’ssaturatedtheTwittersphere.Sohowdoyoustopabadtweetfromspreading?”

Thepairingofthepostthatposedasimplequestionandtheillustrationthatofferedasimplesolutioncreateditsownquietcommentary.Thejournalismofverificationandtheimmediacyenabledbysocialmediacansometimescollide.ThehiddenhandofaneditormethodicallyconfirmingorcorrectingisnotavaluehardwiredintothemobilephoneoutfittedwithTwitter.Atthesametime,Twitterisamongthetoolsenablingfastanddemocraticcorrectivestofalsehoodsutteredinthepublicsquareandpartofanarsenaldeployedintheemergingfieldofinformationforensics.ThehealthyquestionsarisingfromthesetensionsarethefocusofthisSummerissueofNiemanReports.

Theevidenceoffactinflationandmanipulationisnotauniquebyproductofsocialmedia,asweareremindedinthesepagesbythetimelinedocumentingjournalism’slonghistoryoferrorsandlies.CraigSilverman,whowritestheRegrettheErrorblog,recallsa19th-centuryhandbookthatadvisedaspiringjournalistsonthelegitimacyofmanufacturingnon-essentialfactsinsupportofthecentralobjective:“tomakean

interestingstory.”Theadviceoutlivedthecentury.Asayoungreporter,Iwasdisappointedtolearnthatalegendaryjournalist,whileeditinganewspaperstorywrittenbyafriendofmine,hadrearrangedasource’squote,explaining,“Wouldn’titbebetterifhesaiditlikethis?”

Buthumanobstaclestotrutharenowaidedbyincreasinglysophisticatedco-conspirators.Oneofthegreatchallengesforreportersandeditorsistoharnesstechnologicaltoolsandputthemtoworkresponsiblyonbehalfofnewsverificationanddissemination.SometoolsmucholderthanTwitter—photog-raphy,forone—areposingbothnewpossibilitiesandproblemsforguardiansofverisimilitude.SantiagoLyon,directorofphotographyatTheAssociatedPress,writesaboutthelatestversionsofPhotoshophavingthe“abilitytomakesomemanip-ulationvirtuallyundetectable.”ThesoftwaretocounteractthatisstilltooslowtosatisfyanewsorganizationlikeLyon’sthattransmitssome3,000imageseachday.

LindaGreenhouse,aformerNewYorkTimesreporterwhonowteachesatYaleLawSchool,recentlyspokeinBostonaboutfairnessandthepossibilitythatthesymmetrical“hesaid,shesaid”journalismcanactuallyunderminethetruth.WerepriseherremarksnotbecausetheydirectlyaddressthesocialmediachallengescentraltothisissueofNiemanReportsbutbecausesheasksthequestioncentraltoourtime:“Whyisitjustsodifficulttomakethesearchfortruththehighestjournalisticvalue?”

Facts and Friction


CoVERSToRy:TRUTH IN THE AGE oF SoCIAL MEDIA

Itwaseasyforareporterofthetimetogetawaywithafew,orevenabushelof,inventions.Informationwasscarceandcouldtakedaysorweekstomakeitswaytothepublicsphere.Thetelephonewasnotyetwidelyinuse,andthefirsttransatlanticwirelesstransmissionwasyears away.Theearlymass-marketKodakBrowniecamerawasclosetoadecadefromrelease.Themachineryofpublishinganddistributionwasinthehandsofafew.

Ifareporterwantedtofudgeafewdetailstomakehisstoryalittlemorecolorful,well,chancesarenoonewould

noticeorcallhimonit.Shuman’sadviceisobjectionable,but

somethingaboutit—andtheinforma-tionandreportingenvironmentinwhichitwasoffered—seemsquaintandcharm-ingbytoday’sstandards.

Italsohighlightshowmuchthingshavechangedwhenitcomestoaccuracyandverification.“Nottoolongago,reportersweretheguardiansofscarcefactsdeliveredatanappointedtimetoapassiveaudience,”writesStoryfulfounderMarkLittleinhisessayinthisissue.“Todaywearethemanagersofanoverabundanceofinformation

andcontent,discovered,verifiedanddeliveredinpartnershipwithactivecommunities.”

AreporterfollowingShuman’sadvicetodaywouldlikelyfindhisfabricationsswiftlyexposedonsocialmedia.Bloggerswouldtallyoffensesanddelvedeeper.Peoplewithfirsthandknowledgeofthestoryinquestionmightstepforwardwithphotosandvideostocontradicttheinventeddetails.Mediawatchdogs,presscritics,andotherswouldcalloutthereporterandhisemployer.

Inthesamevein,apoliticianorpublicfigurewhopubliclyassertsafalsehoodislikelytobecalledoutbyfact-checkingorganizationssuchasFactCheck.organdPolitiFact.

Neverbeforeinthehistoryofjour-nalism—orsociety—havemorepeopleandorganizationsbeenengagedinfactcheckingandverification.Neverhasitbeensoeasytoexposeanerror,checkafact,crowdsourceandbringtechnologytobearinserviceofverification.

a new age for truth‘Neverhasitbeensoeasytoexposeanerror,checkafact,crowdsourceandbringtechnologytobearinserviceofverification.’

ByCRAIGSILVERMAN

In a handbook for aspiring journalists published in 1894, Edwin L. Shumansharedwhathecalledoneofthe“mostvaluablesecretsoftheprofessionatitspresentstageofdevelopment.”

Herevealedthatitwasstandardpracticeforreporterstoinventafewdetails,providedthemade-upfactswerenonessentialtotheoverallstory.

“Truthinessentials,imaginationinnonessentials,isconsideredalegitimateruleofactionineveryoffice,”hewrote.“Theparamountobjectistomakeaninterestingstory.”


ThisphototakenbyapassengeraftertheLondonsubwaybombingsin2005wasoneofthefirstimagesfromthescene.Itjump-startedeffortsatboththeBBCandTheAssociatedPresstosolicitandverifyuser-generatedcontent.Photo by Alexander Chadwick/AP.

Notsurprisingly,thepriceforinac-curacyhasneverbeenhigher.Thenewworldofinformationabundance,ofreal-timedissemination,ofsmartphonesanddigitalcamerasandsocialnetworkshasbroughtthedisciplineofverificationbackintofashionastheprimarypracticeandvalueofjournalists.

Ithasalsonecessitatedanemergingareaofexpertisebuiltaroundverifyingphotos,videos,tweets,statusupdates,blogposts,andotherdigitalephemera.IoftencallthistheNewVerification.

Butthat’snottosayoldvaluesandskillsaren’tstillatthecoreofthediscipline.

“Thebusinessofverifyinganddebunk-ingcontentfromthepublicreliesfarmoreonjournalistichunchesthansnazzytech-nology,”writesDavidTurnerinhisarticleabouttheBBC’sUserGeneratedContentHub.“Whilesomecallthisnewspecial-izationinjournalism‘informationforen-sics,’onedoesnotneedtobeanITexpertorhavespecialequipmenttoaskandanswerthefundamentalquestionsusedtojudgewhetherasceneisstagedornot.”

TheHubemploysadedicatedteamofjournaliststoverify(anddebunk)contentfromsocialmedia.AlJazeera’ssocialmediateampracticesverificationasacorepartofitswork,asdoesateamofproducersatCNN’siReportplatformforcitizencontent.TheAssociatedPress’sphotodeskalsodedicatessignificanttimeandresourcestosourcingandverifyingphotosandvideosfromsocialnetworks.

AtStoryful,Little,aformertelevi-sionreporter,andateamofjournalistsaroundtheworldoperateanews


>>>


1835LifeontheMoonNewyorkSunThe paper ran a six-part hoax, supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, about a preeminent astronomer at an

observatory in South Africa who had used a new telescope to observe plants, animals and flying man-bats on the moon.

gEttIng It WrongAsamplingofmistakes,fabricationsandmanipulations.

ByJoNATHANSEITZ

organizationthatoffersverificationasoneofitscoreservicesforcustomerssuchasReutersandTheNewYorkTimes.

Imagine:Anoutsourcedverificationoperation,focusedonvettingandcurat-ingsocialmediacontentuploadedandsharedbypeopletheworldover.It’sanewsorganizationandabusinessmodelthatwouldhavebeeninconceivable10yearsago.

RuMoRSANDLIESThecomplexityofverifyingcontentfrommyriadsourcesinvariousmediumsandinrealtimeisoneofthegreatnewchal-lengesfortheprofession.Thiscontentcanprovidecriticalinformationduringconflictsandnaturaldisastersandpro-videclarityandcolortoalocalevent.

Butitalsotakestheformoffraudu-lentmessagesandimagesengineeredbyhoaxers,manipulatorsandpropagan-dists.Rumorsandfalsehoodsspreadjustasquicklyas,ifnotfasterthan,facts.Inmanycasestheyprovemorecompelling,moreconvincing,moreclickable.

“Peopleseemtofinditeasiertobelieverumorsthattheywishweretrueorthatseemtofulfilladesiretoheartheworst,”writesTuscaloosa(Ala.)NewscityeditorKatherineK.LeeinheressayabouttheNews’sPulitzerPrize-winningtornadocoverage.

Lee’sexperiencespeakstoafunda-mental,ifdepressing,truthabouthumansandfacts:justbecausesomethingistrue,itdoesn’tmeanpeoplearemorelikelytobelieveit.Factsalonearenotenoughtopersuade,tochangeminds.

Liarsandmanipulatorsareoftenmorepersuasivethanthepress,evenwithourgrowingcadreofcheckers

andverificationspecialists.Reportingandcheckingthefactsisn’tthesameasconvincingpeopleofthem.

Thisisoneofthebattlesbeingfoughtintheshiftfrominformationscarcityandtightdistributiontoinformationabundanceandmediafragmentation.AsI’vepreviouslywritten,“theforcesofuntruthhavemoremoney,morepeople,and…muchbetterexpertise.Theyknowhowtobirthandspreadaliebetterthanweknowhowtodebunkone.Theyaremorecreativeaboutit,and,bytheverynatureofwhatthey’redoing,theyaren’t

constrainedbyethicsorprofessionalstandards.Advantage,liars.”

ResearchersBrendanNyhanofDartmouthCollegeandJasonReiflerofGeorgiaStateUniversityhaveinrecentyearsprovidedevidencethatthosework-ingtospreadlieslargeandsmallhaveadistinctadvantage:thehumanbrain.

“Unfortunately,availableresearchinthisareapaintsapessimisticpicture:themostsalientmisperceptionsaretypicallydifficulttocorrect,”thepairwroteontheColumbiaJournalismReview’swebsiteearlierthisyear.“Thisisbecause,inpart,people’sevaluationsofnewinforma-tionareshapedbytheirbeliefs.Whenweencounternewsthatchallengesourviews,ourbrainsmayproduceavarietyof

responsestocompensateforthisunwel-comeinformation.Asaresult,correc-tionsaresometimesineffectiveandcanevenbackfire.”

Humansresistcorrectionandaredisinclinedtochangecloselyheldbeliefs.Weseekoutsourcesofinforma-tionthatconfirmourexistingviews.Whenconfrontedbycontraryinforma-tion,wefindwaystoavoidacceptingitastrue.Wearegovernedbyemotion,notbyreason.(ReadmoreaboutthesefactorsinNyhanandReifler’s“Misin-formationandFact-checking:Research

FindingsFromSocialScience,”apaperwrittenforNewAmericaFoundation’sMediaPolicyInitiative,athttp://newamerica.net.)

Thesetruthsabouthumanbehaviorhelpexplainwhypoliticalmisinforma-tionissopervasiveandeffectiveandwhymythsandfalsehoodstakeholdinsoci-ety.TheemergenceofmoneyedSuperPACspromiseanelectionyearlousywithmisleadingads,nastye-mailcampaigns,andmanufacturedlies.

BadactorsalsomakeuseofTwitterandothernetworkstocreatefakeaccountsthatspreaduntruthsorinjectfraudulentchatterintotheconversation.Indictatorships,theycreatefakevideos

andimagesanduploadthemtoYouTubeandotherwebsitesin

Humans…aredisinclinedtochangecloselyheldbeliefs.Weseekoutsourcesofinformationthatconfirmourexistingviews.Whenconfrontedbycontraryinformation,wefindwaystoavoidacceptingitastrue.


thehopethatnewsorganizationsandthepublicwillfindthemandtakethemforreal.

Thereisnoshortageofworkforfactcheckersandtheemergingverifi-cationexpertswithinnewsorgan-izations.Butalongwithcheckingandvetting,wemustalsomaketheproductofthisworkmorepersuasiveandshareable.

Spreadingfactsrequirestheuseofnarrative,powerfulimagesandvisualization,andappealstoemotion.Wemustengagereadersinwaysthathelpthemgetpasttheirbiases.Italsorequiresthatwededicateourselvestospreadingtheskillsofverificationandfactcheckingwithinjournalism—andtothepublicasawhole.

Apublicwiththeabilitytospotahoaxwebsite,verifyatweet,detectafakedphoto,andevaluatesourcesofinformationisamoreinformedpublic.Apublicmoreresistanttountruthsandso-calledrumorbombs.(Think“deathpanels.”)Thisisapublicthatcanparticipateinfactchecking,ratherthanmerelybeanaudienceforit.

Factcheckingandverificationarehavingamomentrightnow.Butwhatmattersiswhetherthisisaflashoraturningpoint—whetheralltheeffortbeingputintofactcheckingandverifi-cationcanhaveameasurableeffectonthepersistenceofmisinformationandliesinournewinformationecosystem.

I’dhateforajournalisttodigupthisissuedecadesoracenturyinthefutureandmarvelatourfoolishnessthewaywedidaboutMr.Shumanandhisgreatsecretof19th-centuryjournalism.

Craig Silverman writes the Regret the Error blog about accuracy, errors and verification for the Poynter Institute, where he is an adjunct faculty member. He is the author of “Regret the Error: How Media Mis-takes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech.”

Journalists know quite well that pictures can and do lie and that photographshavebeenmanipulatedforalongtime.TheSovietsunderStalinweremastersofthis,removingpoliticalfiguresfromimagesastheyfelloutoffavor.LeonTrotskyandotherswoulddisappearfromphotos,erasedfromthehistoricalrecordastheirpoliticalfortunesfell.

Morerecently,theFoxpublicrelationsdepartmenthandedoutaphotoofthe“AmericanIdol”judgesandhostwhichitlateradmittedwasacomposite.

Astechnologiestomanipulateimagesgrowevermoresophisticated,mediaorganizationsareusingsoftwaretohelpdetermineauthenticity.

BySANTIAGoLyoN

detecting the truth in photos

SovietleaderLeonTrotsky,circledatright,atacelebrationofthe1917RussianRevolution.Afterhefelloutoffavor,hewaseliminatedfromthephotobeforeitwasrepub-lishedin1967.Photos from David King Collection, London.


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1861unionWinsBattleofBullRunTheAssociatedPress,othersThe first major Civil War battle looked like a Union victory so many reporters left to file stories. After the Confederates won, Union censors intercepted the AP’s correction.

1888obituaryfortheWrongNobelFrenchnewspapers,TheNewyorkTimes,othersWhen dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel’s brother Ludvig died, many newspapers published obituaries for Alfred.

1912TitanicTowedSafelytoHalifaxTheBaltimoreSun,othersEarly reports about the Titanic disaster had all passengers safe and the ship being towed to Nova Scotia before the extent of the casualties and the sinking were known.

Anotherimage,senttousbyoneofourphotographersfromafuneralinNorthernIrelandsomeyearsago,hadapixilatedmaninthebackgroundwhohadbeenrenderedunrecognizableattherequestoftheactivistscontrollingthefuneral.

Thesearethekindsofmanipulationsthatarefairlyeasytospot.Naturally,wedon’tdistributethem.

Inrecentyears,however,thingshavegottenmorecomplicated.Newsproduc-tionischangingrapidly—fromfewerresourcesinnewsroomstotheuseofuser-generatedcontent.Technologiestomanipulateimagesarebecomingevermoresophisticated.Therearenowcamerasthatcanmakethepeopleinthepictureslookskinnier,andinthelatestversionsofAdobePhotoshopthereistheabilitytomakesomemanipulationvirtuallyundetectable.

Inthisenvironment,thechallengesformajornewsorganizationsareconsiderable.AtTheAssociatedPress

(AP),wetransmitabout3,000imagesevery24hourstosubscribersaroundtheworld.That’salittleoveronemillionimagesayear.

Inthis24-hournewscycle,timelydeliveryisessential.Yetifevenoneoftheimageswedistributeisfoundtobefalseordeliberatelymisleading,ourcredibil-ityandreputationareontheline.

CREATINGANETHICSCoDEOnewake-upcallcamein2004whenoneofourregularphotographerssoldusanimageoffloodinginChina.Wedidn’tnoticeanythingwrongwiththedramaticpicture.

Shortlyafter,wegotamessagefromareaderinFinlandsuggestingthatsomethingwasamisswiththephoto.Wecontactedthephotographerand,underquestioning,headmittedthathehadraisedthewaterlevelfrompeople’skneestotheirwaistsforeffect.Weimmediatelyterminatedourrelationshipwithhim.

Overtheyearswehaveunfortunately

hadoccasiontodismissotherphotog-raphersattheAPformanipulatingimagery—andthesamehashappenedatothernewsagenciesandmediaorganizations.

Thequestionremains:whatcanwedoaboutthisphenomenoninphotojour-nalism,andparticularlywhatcanweattheAPdoaboutit?

Oneoftheimportantstepstotakeinthisnewmediaecologyistoformulateapolicyaboutwhatcanandcannotbedonetoimagery.AP’sethicscodeisquiteclear:

APpicturesmustalwaystellthetruth.

Wedonotalterordigitallymanipu-

latethecontentofaphotographin

anyway.…Noelementshouldbe

digitallyaddedorsubtractedfromany

photograph.Thefacesoridentitiesof

individualsmustnotbeobscuredby

Photoshoporanyothereditingtool.

MinoradjustmentsinPhotoshopare

acceptable.Theseincludecropping,

TheAssociatedPressbarsphotographersfromalteringimagessoafreelancerwasdismissedforeliminatinghisshadowfromthephotoatright.


dodgingandburning,conversioninto

grayscale,andnormaltoningandcolor

adjustmentsthatshouldbelimitedto

thoseminimallynecessaryforclear

andaccuratereproduction…

Eventhesestatementsneedtobesupportedbytrainingandguidance,aswordsalonecannotaddresseverypossiblenuanceintonality,shadingandothervariables.

Wecurrentlyhavemorethan350staffphotographersandphotoeditorsattheAP,andinthepastfewyearswehaveinvestedsubstantiallyinaglobaltrain-ingprogramdesignedtoteachphotog-raphersandeditorsthebestpracticesforusingPhotoshop.Wehaveprovidedclearguidanceonhowtoaccuratelyhandleimagesandwhattodowhenindoubt.

Theprocesschangessomewhatwhenthematerialsubmittedcomesfromamemberofthepublicoracitizenjournalist.Ifirstbecameawareofthepotentialofuser-generatedcontentaftertheLondontransitbombingsin2005.Explosionsdestroyedthreesubwaycarsand,later,abus,killing52peopleandwoundingover700.Photographersandcameracrewswerelimitedtoabove-groundexitstations.Theonlyvisualentrypointtotheheartofthestorydeepundergroundcamefromcellphonephotostakenbypassengersevacuatingthroughundergroundtunnels.

SeeingsuchanimageontheBBCwebsite,wecontactedthepersonwho’dtakenthephoto.Apricewasnegoti-atedfortherightstothatimageandwedistributedit.ThenextdayitwaswidelyusedonfrontpagesandacrosstheInternet.Atthetime,someveteraneditors,citingpoorquality,dismissedtheverynotionoutofhand.Iarguedthatsomeimagewasbetterthannone—andwestartedasustainedeffortattheAPtoobtainstrongcitizencontentwhereandwhenitwasneeded.

MuRkyoRIGINSButtheauthenticityofauser-generatedimageisn’talwaysasclearasitwasin

theLondonbombings,whenwehadaccesstothepersonwhocouldverifyownershipoftheimages,giveusoriginaldatafiles,andsignanagreement.

RecentlyintheMiddleEast,forexample,we’verepeatedlyseeneventswhereaccesshasbeendifficultorimpossibleforprofessionaljournalists.Localgroupshavebeenkeentoshare

imagesbuttrackingdownwhoactu-allyproducedacertainphotoorvideoisextremelydifficult.TheseimagesoftenarepostedonactivistwebsitesorFacebookpageswheremediaorganiza-tionsareinvitedtousethematerialatnocharge.Buthowdoweknowtheseimageshavenotbeenmanipulatedorthatthosepurportingtohavepermissiontodistributethemreallydo?

Likeothernewsorganizations,wetrytoverifyasbestwecanthattheimages

portraywhattheyclaimtoportray.Welookforelementsthatcansupportauthenticity:Doestheweatherreportsaythatitwassunnyatthelocationthatday?Dotheshadowsfalltherightwayconsideringthesourceoflight?Iscloth-ingconsistentwithwhatpeoplewearinthatregion?

Ifwecannotcommunicatewiththevideographerorphotographer,wewilladdadisclaimerthatsaystheAP“isunabletoindependentlyverifytheauthenticity,content,locationordateofthishandoutphoto/video.”

WealsofrequentlyworkwithHanyFarid,aforensiccomputerscientistatDartmouthCollegewhohasdevelopedsoftwarethatcanoftendetectphotomanipulation.Butittakestimetocheckforavarietyofpossiblealterationsandthetechnology,stillinitsinfancy,cannotyetdetecteveryskillfulmanipulation,suchastheonethatraisedthefloodwa-tersinthepicturefromChina.

Anotherlimitationisthatfullanalysisofapictureoftenrequiresalargeorigi-nalimagefile.Thesmall,low-resolutionphotographsdistributedacrosssocialmediacanmakeitnearlyimpossibletodetectmanipulation.

Allthatsaid,Ithinksuchmanipu-lation-detectionsoftwarewillbecome

moresophisticatedandusefulinthefuture.Thistechnology,alongwithrobusttrainingandclearguidelinesaboutwhatisacceptable,willenablemediaorganizationstoholdthelineagainstwillfulimagemanipulation,thusmaintainingtheircredibilityandreputa-tionaspurveyorsofthetruth.

Santiago Lyon, a 2004 Nieman Fellow, is a vice president and director of photog-raphy at The Associated Press.

Anairplanepassenger’sphotoofthespaceshuttleEndeavorafterliftoffwentviral,thenwasboughtbyTheAssociatedPress.Photo by Stefanie Gordon/AP.

Localgroups[intheMiddleEast]havebeenkeentoshareimagesbuttrackingdownwhoactuallyproducedacertainphotoorvideoisextremelydifficult.


>>>


1918EndofWorldWarIunitedPressInternationalUPI president Roy Howard was visiting a French naval office on Nov. 7 when a U.S. commander told him that Germany had surrendered. Howard sent the false report to New

York, and UPI distributed it four days before the armistice was signed.

1927EdnaSt.VincentMillayProfileTheNewyorkerDetails about the poet’s parents were wrong. (Her father was a school teacher, not a stevedore, for example.) The errors led to the creation of the fact-checking department.

1948“DeweyDefeatsTruman”ChicagoTribuneEditors relied on polls and the opinion of its Washington correspon-dent to incorrectly announce in early editions that Thomas Dewey had won the presidential election.

A group of soldiers speaking Arabic shovelsandintoapitwhileadisem-bodiedvoicewails.Afterafewsecondsitbecomesapparentthatthedesperatevoiceiscomingfromamanburiedinthetrench;theheadaloneisvisible.

Thesoldiers—anumberdressed,incongruously,insneakers—appeartoreplywithgloatingtaunts.Buttheyaremainlyconcentratingonthejobathand:coveringthevictim’sheadinearth.Theydotheirgrislyjobwell;inlessthanaminutehisheadiscompletelyburied.Thevideothenendsabruptly—therestissilence.

Onerain-sweptmorninginApril,TrusharBarot,assistanteditorattheBBC’sUser-GeneratedContent(UGC)HubinLondon’sratherbleaklymono-lithicBBCTelevisionCentre,wasstudy-ingtheanonymouslypostedfootageonYouTube.HisTwitterfeedwasbuzzing

withnewsoftheclip.JonWilliams,theBBC’sworldnewseditor,hadalsoraiseditatthe9o’clocknewsmeeting.Whateveryonewantedtoknow,onTwitterandinthenewsroom,wasthis:Wasthevideorealorfake?ThatisthekindofquestiontheHubistheretoinvestigate.

AFATEFuLERRoRStartedin2005tosiftthroughunsolic-itedcontributionspreviouslyperusedbymanydifferentteams,theHubhasgrowntoacomplementof20staffers.Initially,theteamfocusedheavilyonimages,footageandeyewitnessaccountse-mailedtotheBBC,butinthepastfewyearspeoplehavebecomemuchmorepronetodistributematerialthemselvesthroughTwitter,YouTubeandFacebook.Asaresult,thenumberofcontributionsprofferedtotheBBChasdeclinedtoabout3,000aday,andtheHub’stask

hasmovedtowardsemi-conventionalnewsgatheringwithaWeb2.0twist.Staffersnowusesearchterms,seewhat’strendingonTwitter,andlookattheimagesandfootagetrustedcontactsarediscussingontheirTwitterstreams.

Thegoldenrule,sayHubveterans,istogetonthephonewhoeverhaspostedthematerial.Eventheprocessofsettinguptheconversationcanspeakvolumesaboutthesource’scredibility:unlesssourcesareactivistslivinginadicta-torshipwhomustremainanonymoustoprotecttheirlives,peoplewhoaregenuinewitnessestoeventsareusuallyeagertotalk.Anyonewhohastakenphotosorvideoneedstobecontactedinanycasetorequesttheirpermission,asthecopyrightholder,touseit.

Theriskofpostingnon-authenticatedimagesishigh,astheHubwasremindedonSunday,May27.Asabreakingnews

Inside the bbc’s Verif ication hub‘Whateveryonewantedtoknow,onTwitterandinthenewsroom,wasthis:Wasthevideorealorfake?Thatisthekindofquestionthe[User-GeneratedContent]Hubistheretoinvestigate.’

ByDAVIDTuRNER



ThisfakephotoofthedeadosamabinLadenwasdebunkedbytheBBC’suser-GeneratedContentHub.usingTinEye,theteamrevealedthatbinLaden’sfeatureshadbeendigitallysuperimposedontheheadofadeadAfghanfighter.Photo by Philip Hollis.


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1954Dr.AlbertSchweitzerintheCongoLifemagazine,elsewherePhotographer W. Eugene Smith merged two images to create one of his most memorable pictures for Life magazine. It also appeared on the cover of “Let Truth Be the Prejudice.”

1972ThomasEagleton’sPastTheWashingtonPostWithout evidence to back up the claim, Jack Anderson reported that Democratic vice presidential nomi-nee Thomas Eagleton had a history of drunken driving charges.

1980“Jimmy’sWorld”TheWashingtonPostReporter Janet Cooke fabricated an 8-year-old heroin addict for a story. She won a Pulitzer Prize, which was later returned.

storyaboutamassacreinHoula,Syria,unfolded,staffmembersspottedapowerfulphotocirculatedonTwitter,showingshroudedbod-iesinrowsandapparentlysourcedfromactivistsinSyria.“TheoriginaldistributorofthephotoonTwitterwastrackeddown,wespoketothem,andtheygaveusinformationaboutitssourcing,”saysChrisHamilton,theBBC’ssocialmediaeditorsince2011.“SothepicturewaspublishedontheBBCNewswebsite,withadisclaimersayingitcouldnotbeindependentlyverified.”

SeeingtheBBCNewswebsite,GettyphotographerMarcoDiLauroalmostfelloffhischair,helatertoldTheDailyTelegraph—theimagesupposedlyshowingtheshockingaftermathoftheHoulamassacrewasaphotohe’dtakeninIraqin2003.HepostedonFacebook:“Somebodyisusingmyimagesasapro-pagandaagainsttheSyriangovernmenttoprovethemassacre.”Meanwhile,alertedbyusers,theBBCtookdowntheimage—90minutesafterithadbeenposted.Butthedamagewasdone:TheDailyTelegraphandotherpublicationsreportedontheerror,andtheblogo-spherewentwildoveraccusationsthattheBBCwaspushingtheanti-SyriapositionoftheBritishgovernment.Interestingly,fewreadersorcommenta-torsacceptedthedisclaimerpostedwiththephoto—akeyelementtohowmanynewsorganizationstodayhandlethechallengethattherearefewindepen-dentreportersincountriessuchasSyriaandthatactiv-ists’accountsandfootageoftencannotbeverified.

“Postingthisphotowasamistake,thereisnoquestion,”saysHamilton.“Weshouldhavemademorechecks,asisnormalpractice,andthedecisiontopublishshouldhavebeendelayed,somethingweareveryhappytodoinanenvironmentwherebeingrightismoreimportantthanbeingfirst.”Headds:“Butthiswasnotasystematicerror.Wehaveastrongtrackrecordofstoppingnumerousexamplesofincorrectmaterialmakingittoairoronline.”

Whilefrustrating,theintentional“redistribution”oftheIraqphotoillus-tratesthat“governmentsdon’thaveamonopolyonspinningthemedia,”saysHamilton.“Thereisalotofpotentialfor

activiststobefakingandspinningthingsinawaythatputstheircauseforward.Itis

somethingweareallawareof.Butithastobenavigatedaneweachandeverytimewelookatfootage.Thereareveryfewthingsthatcangiveyou100percentcertainty.”

RAISINGDouBTSAuthenticatingphotosandvideo,inotherwords,canbeatrickybusiness,evenforseniorstaffattheHub.DuringmyvisitinMay,assistanteditorBarotrecountedhowonthatrainyAprilmorn-inghewentaboutvettingthegrislyvideoofthemanbeingburiedbypeoplewhoappeartobeSyriansoldiers:By9:20a.m.hehade-mailedthevideotoacol-league,anArabic-speakingSyrianatBBCMonitoring,whichuseslanguagespecial-iststogatherinformationfrommediaoutletsacrosstheworld.At10:12a.m.thecolleaguee-mailedback:Thesoldiers’

Thisphoto,takeninIraqin2003,waspostedontheBBC’shomepageonMay27,2012toaccompa-nyanarticleaboutamassacreinHoula,Syria.IthadbeendistributedbySyrianactivistsonsocialmedia.Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Reportage by Getty Images.


accentsareAlawite,theethnicgroupwhichrulesSyriaandprovidesmanyofitssoldiers.AndsneakersarecommonlyworninsomeSyrianunits.However,thecolleaguewonderedhowthevoiceofamanwhosefaceisbeingcoveredinsandcouldbesoconsistentlyaudible—unlesshehasbeenfittedwithamicrophone?

Barothadnoticedthistoo,plusanothercauseforsuspicion:Whydoesthevideoendonlyafewsecondsafterthevictim’sheadhassubmergedcom-pletely?Coulditbebecauseithastobeshortenoughforhimtoholdhisbreath?

Hishunchcorroboratedbythissecondsource,Barote-mailedcolleaguesaroundtheBBCwithin10minutestotellthemtheHubhadreservationsabouttheclip.Ithadfailedthetest.

ThedubiousvideoillustratesapointmaderepeatedlybyBarotandhisbossChrisHamilton:Thebusinessofverify-inganddebunkingcontentfromthepublicreliesfarmoreonjournalistichunchesthansnazzytechnology.Whilesomecallthisnewspecializationinjournalism“informationforensics,”onedoesnotneedtobeanITexpertorhavespecialequipmenttoaskandanswerthefundamentalquestionsusedtojudgewhetherasceneisstagedornot.

“Peoplearesurprisedtofindwe’renotaveryhigh-tech,CSI-typeofteam,”saysBarot.HeandHamilton,liketheHub’sothermembers,haveconventionaljournalismbackgrounds.Hamilton,forexample,hasdonestintsasreporterandeditorduringhis12yearsattheBBC.

STREAMLINEDFuTuREIt’stimefortheHub’s10a.m.newsmeeting,whichhasthefeelofanymorningconfabulationofjournalistsatamediaoutlet,includingapalpablesenseofimpatiencetostopconferringandgetonwiththeday’swork.

Aftersettingprioritiesfortherestoftheday,Hamiltonfindsacrampedofficeinwhichtodiscussthefutureofverification.

IstheHubheretostay?“We’reseeingcorrespondentsandproducersbuilding

uptheirverificationskills,andyou’vegottoworkoutwhetherit’ssomethingyouneedspecialistsfor,”Hamiltonsays.But,headds,“insomeformyou’llalwaysneedthem,”ifonlyforthesakeofefficiency.

Hamiltoncan,however,foreseeatimewhenthesizeoftheBBC’sHubteammightshrinkasverificationis“indus-trialized.”Bythat,hemeansthatsomeproceduresarelikelytobecarriedoutsimultaneouslyattheclickofanicon.

Healsoexpectsthattechnologicalimprovementswillmaketheautomatedcheckingofphotosmoreeffective.UsefulonlinetoolsforthisareGoogle’sadvancedpicturesearchorTinEye,whichlookforimagessimilartothephotocopiedintothesearchfunction.BarotusedTinEyetodisproveoneofseveralgoryfakeimagesofOsamabinLaden’sheadthatcirculatedonlinesoonafterhisdeathlastyear.Hetrackeddowntheoriginalphotoofanothercorpse’sface,ontowhichbinLaden’sfeaturesweregraftedusingAdobePhotoshop.

Respondingtothetendencyforsocialmediatoactasarumormillforoutlandishtheories,theHubsteersclearoftweetsthataskthepublicwhethersomethingistrue—incontrasttosomejournalistswhouseTwitterforcrowd-sourcing.HamiltonjustifiesthisbypointingoutthatthemerefacttheBBCisinvestigatingarumor“lendscredencetotheideathatitmightbetrue.”

However,thereisnoquestionattheHubabouttherolejournalistsshouldplayinverifyingonlineinformationwiththeirtrustedtoolsandtechniques.“UGCandverificationarenolongerasideoperation,”saysHamilton.“Theyhavebecomepartofthejournalistictoolbox,alongsideagencypictures,fieldreport-ers,backgroundinterviews.It’scriticalforanybignewsroomthatwantscred-ibilityinstorytelling.”

David Turner is a freelance journalist and author based in London. He was a correspondent at the Financial Times for 10 years.

VEttIng InFormatIonMembers of the BBC’s User-Generated Content Hub offered tips for determining the veracity of videos and photographs:

Trytotalktotheoriginalsourceofthematerial.You will quickly form an instinctive feel-ing about whether the person is telling the truth. one caveat: It may not be possible or even desirable to talk to an activist whose life will be in danger if they are identified. Ifmaterialseemstoogoodtobetrue,beskeptical—butkeepanopenmind.The famous shot of a woman jumping out of a burning building during last summer’s London riots, neatly silhouetted against a raging inferno, initially aroused suspicions. However, the Hub verified it.Trytodeterminewherethematerialfirstappearedonline.It could give clues about the identity and motives of the person who posted it.Consultspecialists.The BBC Monitoring Service can advise on accents. Use expert local knowledge of towns to advise whether images and videos depict the purported place.usetechnologytohelpyou.Examples include Google Earth (to confirm that the features of the alleged location match the photo) and TinEye. But do not do so at the expense of jour-nalistic instinct. Not all the faked photos of the osama bin Laden corpse could be disproved by technical means, but BBC verifiers decided nonetheless that no possible explanation of how a real photo had leaked was credible.SeewhatotherverificationexpertsaresayingaboutanitemonTwitter.They may have useful information or ideas. —D.T.


>>>


1982MovingtheGreatPyramidofGizaNationalGeographicA photograph of two pyramids was manipulated to better fit on the cover.

1983Hitler’sForgedDiariesStern(Germany),Newsweek,TheTimes(London)Stern staff reporter Gerd Heidemann procured what were purported to be the personal diaries of Adolf Hitler but no German experts on

World War II were asked to authenticate them.

1992TruckExplosion“DatelineNBC”For a segment about automo-bile safety, “Dateline” producers tampered with a GM truck to ensure that it would explode during a test crash. GM sued.

When I was a young TV journalist, thephrase“goldenhour”meanttheearlyeveninglightthatbathedfacesandlandscapesinawarmforgivingglow.Asasocialjournalist,I’vestartedtousetheterminadifferentway.

Inowthinkofthegoldenhourasthetimeittakessocialmediatocreateeitheranempoweringtruthoranunstoppablelie,whenacelebritydeathtrendsonTwitteroranexplosivevideosurfacesonYouTube.Inotherwords,whenjournal-ismcanmattermost.

WhenIfoundedStoryfulin2010,Iimaginedanewsagencybuiltforthesocialmediaage.Iwantedtocreatetheproductsandprotocolsthatwouldequipotherjournaliststomeetthechallengesofthegoldenhour.

AtStoryful,wethinkacombinationofautomationandhumanskillprovides

thebroadestsolution.Weareanewsagencybutalsoatechnologystart-up.Ourengineersworksidebysidewithourjournalists.

TheStoryfuldevelopmentteamisbuildingproductsthatwillhelpourjournalistsandclientsmapinfluenceandconnectionswithinsocialmediaconversationsandgetanearlywarningofchangesintheirspeedorintensity.

Wearealsoworkingtoscalethetech-niquesoureditorialteamhasperfectedinvalidatingvideosandimages.Atitscore,thisprocessisbuiltaroundachecklist:

nCanwegeo-locatethisfootage?ArethereanylandmarksthatallowustoverifythelocationviaGoogleMapsorWikimapia?

nArestreetscapessimilartogeo-locatedphotosonPanoramioorGoogleStreetView?

nDoweatherconditionscorrespondwithreportsonthatday?

nAreshadowsconsistentwiththereportedtimeofday?

nDovehicleregistrationplatesortrafficsignsindicatethecountryorstate?

nDoaccentsordialectsheardinavideotellusthelocation?

nDoesitjibewithotherimagerypeopleareuploadingfromthislocation?

nDoesthevideoreflecteventsasreportedonStoryful’scuratedTwitterlistsorbylocalnewssources?

Thisformofinquiryisasoldasjournalismitself,evenifthetechnologyisnot.Ourapproachtoauthenticatingsourcesisalsodrawn

‘Journalistsneedtogetcomfortablewithrisk,transparencyandcollaboration.Weneedtoabandonthenotionthatwehaveamonopolyontruth.’

ByMARkLITTLE

Finding the WisdomIn the crowd


thE procEss oF VErIFIcatIon

LookFoRLANDMARkS.Thekeypointisthemosque’sdistinctivemina-ret,whichisvisibleinthesatelliteimagefromGoogleMapsbecauseoftheshadowitcasts.

In March, Storyful’s sources in Syria tweeted that security forces were mov-ing through Idlib province. In search-ing for visual evidence, the Storyful team found a 30-second YouTube clip which claimed to show troops in the Idlib town of Darkoush. News editor Malachy Browne explains a number of details that were checked to verify that the town shown was, in fact, Darkoush.

CoNSIDERyouRSouRCES.Theuser,DarkoushRevo(“DarkoushNews”),uploadsexclusivelyfromthistownandwasactiveonthedayinquestion.AffiliatedFacebookandTwitteraccountsarealsoDarkoush-centric.

CHECkTHEWEATHER.WolframAlphasearchenginedoesn’thavedetailsforthetownofDarkoush,butitdoesnotecloudcoverinIdlibprovinceonthatdate,whichmatcheswiththeweatherinthevideo.

SuRVEyTHELANDSCAPE.Thevideoshowshillsinthedistance,whichcorrespondtoGoogle’sterrainmapofthetown.


>>>


1994Faceofo.J.SimpsonTimeThe magazine darkened the mug shot of murder suspect o.J. Simpson that it put on the cover.

1998StephenGlassFabricationsTheNewRepublicThe associate editor was found to have fabricated at least 27 articles that he’d written for The New Repub-lic. In one case, he created a website for a fake company.

1999WenHoLeeTheNewyorkTimes,variousoutletsThe scientist was incorrectly identi-fied as having leaked nuclear secrets to the Chinese. He received a settle-ment from the government and five media organizations.

fromtheeternalvaluesofstorytell-ing.TheStoryfulteamusesthephrase“humanalgorithm”tosumupitshybridapproach.Everynewseventintheageofsocialmediacreatesacommunity.Whennewsbreaks,anetworkgatherstotalkaboutthestory.Somearewitnesses,othersareamplifiers,andineverygrouptherearetrustedfilters.

Theproblemforjournalistsbornintoanageofelitesisthatthesefilterslooknothinglikeourtraditionalsources,whoaregenerallyrankedonthebasisofpowerandauthority.Authorityhasbeenreplacedbyauthenticityasthecurrencyofsocialjournalism.Thekeytoengagingwithacommunityistoseekoutthoseclosesttothestory.Theyrarelyhaveatitlebutarepeopleofstandingwithinacommunity.Theyareguidestothewis-domwithintheircrowdandinterpretersofnuance:ifyouareverifyingvideofromSyriayoudon’twantaforeignpolicywonk,youwantsomeonewhocandistinguishbetweenaDamascusandaHomsaccent.

Ourapproachtoratingsourcesandthevideotheyuploadrevolvesaroundanotherchecklist:

nWhereisthisaccountregisteredandwhereistheuploaderbased,judgingbyhisorherhistory?

nArethereotheraccounts—Twitter,Facebook,ablog,orwebsite—affiliatedwiththisuploader?Howcantheyhelpusidentifylocation,activity,reliability,biasandagenda?

nHowlonghavetheseaccountsbeeninexistence?Howactivearethey?

nDoestheuploaderwriteinslangordialectthatisidentifiableinthevideo’snarration?

nCanwefindWHOIS(domainregis-tration)informationforanaffiliatedwebsite?

nIsthepersonlistedinlocaldirectories?Doestheperson’sonlinesocialcirclesindicateaproximitytothestory/location?

nDoestheuploader“scrape”videosfromnewsorganizationsandYouTubeaccounts?

nArevideodescriptionsdated?Doesthetitleofthevideohavefileextensionssuchas.AVIor.MP4?

nArewefamiliarwiththisaccount?Hasthecontentandreportagebeenreliable?

Reportersaretaughtnevertoexposetheirownignorancebut“Idon’tknow”isthestartingpointinanyhonestinves-tigationofonlinecommunitiesandtheir

content.Internallyweconsciouslyusetheword“validation”insteadofverifica-tion.Ourroleistoprovidetheessentialcontextthatwillallownewsroomstomakeinformedjudgmentsaboutcontentthatmayneverbecompletelyfreeofrisk.

Thisdoesnotmeanthatsocialjour-nalistsshouldnotdeliverjudgments.Itisnotgoodenoughtobroadcastauser-generatedvideoandthensayitcan’tbeverified.Youmusttelluswhatyoudidto

verifyitandwhatcontextexists,ifany.Youarestillajournalist.

Storyfulhasadvantagesinadjustingtotherealitiesofsocialjournalism.Wedon’tdependonratingsortraffic.Ourmissionistohelpotherjournalists,par-ticularlythosewhocreatetherealvalue.

StoryfulworkedwithABCNewstoreportthedeathofOsamabinLaden,discoveringcontentandmappingkeylocationsandimages.Butwewereinnodoubtthatthepersonwhoreallymat-teredonthatdaywasNickSchifrin,thecorrespondentinPakistan.

WhenweworkwithclientslikeTheNewYorkTimes,forexample,ourjobisnottotaketheplaceofitsreportersbuttohelpturnuser-generatedcontentintosomethingtheycansafelyuse.ThismayinvolveaddingcontexttovideoforTheLedeblog,buildingaTwitterlistfora

beatreporterorhelpingthepicturedeskfindacorroboratingsource.

Wheresocialjournalistslikeuscanprovideauniquebenefitisinourembraceofcollaboration.Itdoesnotcomenaturallytojournaliststorisktheirreputationbyengagingwithonlinecom-munities.Butthereisnoalternativeinthegoldenhour.

Iwouldgofurther:allnewsorganiza-tionsneedtoradicallyreconsidertheirapproachtoeachother.Therereally

Everynewseventintheageofsocialmediacreatesacommunity.Whennewsbreaks,anetworkgatherstotalkaboutthestory.Somearewitnesses,othersareamplifiers,andineverygrouptherearetrustedfilters.


The conversation on the desk usuallygoeslikethis:“Wow.DidyouseethisiReport?Incredible.”

“Yeah,nokidding.Buthowarewegoingtovetit?”

Theanswerinbroadstrokes:It’sanemergingcraft,onethatcombinesaneyeforagoodstorywithaflairforconnectingthedotsand,aboveall,ahumantouch.

VettingistheheartofiReport,CNN’splatformforcitizenjournalism.Youwon’tseeiReportsontelevisionoronCNN.com(outsidethespecialiReportsection,thatis)beforethey’vebeenfactcheckedandcleared.

Thevettingprocessisrigorousandsometimestime-consuming.Itusuallystartswithaphonecall,mostoftenfromtheiReportdeskinAtlanta,whereeightfull-timeproducerstabthroughhundredsofincomingphotosandvideoseveryday,lookingfortheoneswethinkwillmakeanimpact.

About8percentofcontributionsareselectedforvetting,aprocessthatalsoalertsTVanddigitalproducerstherewilllikelybeanelementreadytogolaterintheday.VettediReportsoftenturnintointerviewsegmentsonairorquotesinstoriesyoureadonline.

Vetting citizen Journalism‘It’sanemergingcraft,onethatcombinesaneyeforagoodstorywithaflairforconnectingthedotsand,aboveall,ahumantouch.’

ByLILAkING

CNN’siReportinvitedviewerstosubmitquestionsforfirstladyMichelleobama.

isnovalueingoingitaloneinthegoldenhour.Ifyoudo,thechanceyouwillbeconsistentlyfirstisnon-existent.Thechancethatyouwilloftenbewrongis100percent.

Fieldreporterslikemegrewupwiththerealityofcollaboration.InmydaysasaWashingtoncorre-spondent,IreliedonpoolcopyfromtheWhiteHouse.Inanywarzone,mybestfriendwasoftenmyfiercestrival.

Theverynotionofthenewsagencystemsfromcollaborationinatimeofdisruption.TheAssociatedPresswastheproductofanhistoricpartnershipbetweenNewYork’sfivedailynewspapersduringtheMexican-AmericanWarofthe1840s.

We’reatthatmomentagain.Facedwithfrighteningdisruptionandstunningpotential,journalistsneedtogetcomfortablewithrisk,transparencyandcollaboration.Weneedtoabandonthenotionthatwehaveamonopolyontruth.

Nottoolongago,reportersweretheguardiansofscarcefactsdeliveredatanappointedtimetoapassiveaudience.Todaywearethemanagersofanoverabundanceofinformationandcontent,discovered,verifiedanddeliveredinpartnershipwithactivecommunities.

Whatdoesthatmeaninpractice?Technologywillplayitspartbutdon’tunderestimatethathumanalgorithm.Weneednewprotocolstoshapecollaborationbetweenjournalistsandcommunities.Per-hapsjustasimportantiscollabora-tionamongjournalists,insideandoutsidethetraditionalstruc-turesofnews.

Ikeeptellingpeopleweareenter-ingagoldenageofjournalism.Itrulybelievethat.Butfirstweneedtofaceuptothechallengeofeachgoldenhour.

Mark Little is founder and CEO of the social news agency Storyful.


>>>


2000PresidentialElectionResultsVariousoutletsMany newspapers and media outlets declared a winner before the vote count in Florida was finalized. The election was eventually decided in court.

2003JaysonBlairTheNewyorkTimesIn at least 36 national stories for the Times, Blair committed numerous fabrications, lied about where he reported from and what he wit-nessed, and made up quotes.

He also plagiarized from wire services and other newspapers. After Blair’s deceptions were uncovered, two top editors stepped down, cor-rection procedures were tightened, and a public editor was appointed to evaluate, criticize and comment on the paper’s integrity.

OnemorninginJanuary,forexample,iReportproducerChristinaZdanowiczhitthedesktofindscoresofnewphotosandvideosshowingprotestsoverincreasedfuelpricesinNigeria.OftenwhensimilarstoriespileuponiReport,they’recon-nectedtoanewseventCNNisalreadyontopof,likeanaturaldisasterorabigpoliticalrally.TheNigerianiReportstookusabitbysurprise—CNNwasnotyetreportingthissoiReportwasaskedtosketchoutthestory.

VERIFyINGREPoRTSOneimportantcontributionwasavideoshowingaprotestinthestreetsofIbadan,Nigeria,earlierthatmorning.Toinvestigatetheauthenticityoftheclip,ZdanowiczreachedouttotheIbadaniReporter,a24-year-oldpharmacistnamedBomaTai.Hedescribedwhenandwhereandwhytheprotestwashap-peningandwhowasparticipating.

Allgoodandusefuldetail,buttherewasacatch:Hewasn’tjustobserving,hewasparticipating,andhesharedfoot-ageoftheeventbecausehewanted“theworldtoknowinrawanduneditedtermswhatisgoingoninNigeria…thepooraresuffering!”Sowedecidedtoseewhatothercontextwecouldfindtofilloutthestory.

Mostofthevideoweseeofprotests

andsimilarnewseventsisliketheIbadanclip:itcomesfromsomeoneintheheartofthestory,withaverysub-jectiveviewofevents.Nosurprise,ofcourse,becauseiReportandmostsocialmediaplatformsarebuiltforsharingthemomentsofyourlife.

AtCNNweseeitasourresponsibilitytoaddcontextandanalysistowhatweusefromiReportandothersocialmediaplatforms.That’swhywiththeNigeriaprotest,theiReportteamcontinuedtomakecallsallmorningtoiReportcontributorswho’dseensimilarprotestsinLagosandAbujaandBeninCity.

ThenweworkedwithareporteratCNNInternationalwhoconnectedthedetailswe’dresearchedwithcom-mentsfromthelocalpolice,theofficeofPresidentGoodluckJonathan,andtheeconomicandhistoriccontextoffuelpricesubsidiesinNigeria.Together,thecitizenjournalism,ourresearch,andthe

reporter’scontributionsformedacom-prehensivestorythatprovidedimagesandvideooftheprotestsaswellasnewsanalysisexplainingthecontextandwhythiswashappening.

Inanumberofways,theNigerianproteststoryisasimpleexample.Aftertalkingtodozensofpeopleaboutthesameevents,itwasn’tahugeleaptosaythatwebelievedtheyhadhappened,

eventhoughCNNdidn’thaveareporteronthegroundtowitnessthem.

ThechallengewasdifferentwhenateenagegirlpostedavideooniReportshowingherbeingbullied.Weverifiedittheold-fashionedway—bytalkingwithherfamilyandschoolofficialsandtrack-ingdownpolicereports.

AndwhenaSouthCarolinawomanstartedpostingbiting—andpopular—webcamcommentariesaboutthe2012Republicanpresidentialprimaryrace,thevettingprocesswasn’tsomuchaboutgettinginsideherheadandverifyingwhethershereallythinksthethingsshesaid.Itwasmoreaboutfiguringoutwhosheisandhowshegottothepointofpostingvideosofhercommentaryandsayingthatplainlyandclearlytoouraudience.

AtiReportweuseavarietyoftools:CNN-ersinthefield,subject-matterexperts,affiliatenetworks,andlocalmedia.Wecross-checkwhatwelearnfromcitizenjournalistswithothersocialmediareports.

Wealsousetechnology,whichcan’tproveifastoryisreliablebutoffershelp-fulclues.Forexample,weoftencheckphotometadatatofindtimestampsandsometimeslocationdataaboutthesourcephotooraskaphotographertosharethepreviousornext10imagesfromhercamera.WealsooccasionallysendanimagethroughaservicelikeTinEyetohelpdeterminewhetheritshowssignsofalteration.

That’sthejournalismpart—figuringoutwhatyouneedtoaddtoavideoorphotothatyoufindontheInternettomakesenseofitandtohelpsomeoneelseunderstandwhyitmatters.

AtiReportweuseavarietyoftools:CNN-ersinthefield,subject-matterexperts,affiliatenetworks,andlocalmedia.Wecross-checkwhatwelearnfromcitizenjournalistswithothersocialmediareports.


It all began with an argument. Onsomeoneelse’sFacebookwalliswhereIfirstencounteredAmina.Shewasfeisty,unapologeticand,thoughIcan’trememberwhatwearguedabout,Irememberherapologyafterward,writtenprivatelytomeinaFacebookmessage.Soonafterward,webecameFacebook“friends,”thoughadmittedlywerarelyexchangedmessages.Itwasn’tuntilmonthslaterwhen,afterreadingapieceinTheGuardianaboutaDamascene“gaygirl”whosebraveblogginghadearnedheraccolades,IputtwoandtwotogetherandrealizedthatAminawasthatgirl.

Soonafter,however,thingstookaturnfortheworse:Amina,itwasreportedonherownblogonJune6,2011,hadbeenkidnappedbySyriansecretpoliceforces.Inamatterofjust24hours,theinternationalmediawasinafrenzyoverAmina’sdisappearance.Butasafewskepticsbegantosearchforsomeone,anyonewhoknewAminapersonally,herelaboratestorybegantoquicklyunravelandbyJune12,sixdaysafterhersupposedkidnapping,thetruthbecameknown:AminawasnogaygirlinDamascus,butinsteadawhite,AmericanmaninScotlandnamedTomMacMaster.

Throughoutthepastyear,andevenbeforeAmina’sstory,therehasbeenanabundanceofdiscussiononsocialmediaverification,aswellastheneedfor

anonymitywhenreportingfromplaceslikeSyria.Somuchofthedebatehasfocusedoncitizenjournalism,thepracti-tionersofwhichareoftendeemedpronetoerrors,thatwesoeasilyforgetthatprofessionaljournalistsmakemistakes,too.ThoughitwasindeedTheGuardianthatpublishedthestorythatallowedustobelievethatAminawasreal,Idon’tplacetoomuchblameonthejournalist—thepseudonymousKatherineMarsh—forhererror.ThoughMarsh’seditorshouldhavedoubtedtheveracityofthecontentuponlearningthatMarshhadconductedherinterviewovere-mail

doubting amina Thebiggesthoaxof2011fooledactivistsandjournalistsalike.Onewriterandfreespeechadvocateexplainswhysomanywantedtobelieveinthe‘GayGirlinDamascus.’

ByJILLIANyoRk

BuILDINGCoMMuNITyButthereisalsothecommunitypart:VettediReportsareagiantRolodexofstoriesandpeopletofollowupon.ThisMarchwhentheworldmarkedthefirstanniversaryoftheearth-quakeandtsunamiinJapan,CNNaskedtheiReporterswhohadsharedfootageofthateventforupdatesonhowtheywerefaring.Theresultisastenderaportraitasyou’llreadinananniversarypiece.

Morethanofferingimmediatefirsthandglimpsesofbreakingnews,thecommunitywearebuildingmaybetherealsecretbehindiReport’ssuccess.Ourplatformprovidesanopendoortoparticipatinginthenewstoalmostanyonewhocarestoenter,andagrowingnumberofpeoplefromallovertheworldaredoingjustthat;asofMay2012,thereweremorethanonemillionregis-terediReporters.

Outsideofvetting,theiReportteaminAtlantaspendsthemajorityofitstimedreamingupwaystoinvitethatcommunity—bothexistingandfuturemembers—totakepartinwhatCNNisdoing.Forexample,we’vecomeupwithnewmodels,suchasarecentcommunity-driveninterviewwithfirstladyMichelleObamaoramash-upvideooffootageshotbypeopleinvariouscitiesandcountriesonasingledayinMarch.

Wediscoveredearlyonthatitwasn’tenoughtowaitfornewstobreakandhopepeoplemightthinktocontribute(andsetoffthevettingprocess).iReporttodayisahighlycollaborativeeffortamongprofes-sionaljournalists,eyewitnessesandpassionateparticipantstotellthefullbreadthofnewsstoriesastheyunfoldandtoreinventtheprocesstogetheraswego.

Lila King is participation director for CNN Digital, where her work is focused on inviting CNN’s global audiences to participate in the news.

Thesupposedarrestofthe“GayGirlinDamascus”bloggerprovokedacampaign.


>>>


andinstantmessenger,IunderstandalltoowellwhyMarshbelieved“Amina,”becauseIdid,too.

DuringthesixdaysofthesearchforAmina,IwasdirectlyintouchwiththosedoingthediggingandIadmit:Iatfirstresisted—andresented—theirsearch.IwasataconferenceinNewYorkatthetime,aswasNPR’sAndyCarvin—amongthefirsttoexpressdoubtaboutAmina—andIrecallarguingwithhimaboutwhetheritwastherightthingtodowhenalifecouldbeatstake.Iwasupset,angryandwantingtobelieve.

ThedetailsaboutDamascusputforthbyMacMasterwereplausible,atleastenoughsothatmySyrianfriendsfailedtospotanyerrors.Infact,asmydoubtcreptinaboutAmina,IbeganwritingtoourmanymutualFacebook

friends—mostlyArabwomen—toaskifanyofthemknewherinreallife.Atfirst,atleasttwoimplied“yes,”atestamenttohowmuchweallwantedtobelievethatnoonecouldbesocallous.

Andyet,callousisthefirstwordthatcomestomindwhenIthinkofwhatTomMacMasterdid.InaninterviewwithTheGuardianinJune2011,Mac-Masterattemptedanapology,stating:

Iregretthatquiteanumberofpeople

areseeingmyhoaxasdistractingfrom

realnews,realstoriesaboutSyria,

andrealconcernsofreal,actualon

thegroundbloggerswherepeople

willdoubttheirveracityandthefact

thatIthinkit’sonlyamatteroftime

beforesomeoneintheSyrianregime

says‘See,allouroppositionisfake,

it’snotreal.’

Settingasideforamomenthowshallowanapologyitwas,IaminsteadstruckbyMacMaster’sforesightinrecognizingthedamagehishoaxwouldcause.Oneyearlater,andtheregimehasmaintainedpowerbydoingjustthat:Portrayingtheoppositionastherealproblem,as“terrorists.”

Andthatispreciselywhywewanttobelieveeachstory.WeknowthehorrorsthattheSyrianregimeiscapableof,andweknowthatthousandsofSyrianshavebeenkilledwhileothershavebeen

imprisoned.Weseethevideosandtheimagesandhearthedesperatepleasonsocialmedia.Andtherefore,whendoubtseepsin,wefinditharderandhardertobelievethenextstory.OneneedonlylooktotheconversationstakingplaceeverydayonTwitter—andeveninthemajormediaofsomeforeigncoun-tries—toseehowpervasivethedoubtingofSyriannarrativeshasbecome.

Andyet,thejournalisticerrorscontinueaswell.FollowingtheMay25massacreinHoulainwhich108people,mostlywomenandchildren,werekilled,theBBCusedaphotographofshroudedbodiesthathadactuallybeentakeninIraqinMay2003.Whilethephotographhadgoneviralonsocialmedia,theBBCerroneouslypostingitledtomoreaccusationsofjournalisticbiasandmoredoubt.

Onanormalday,ajournalist’smistakemightcosthimsomerespect,maybeevenhisjob.Butwhenreportingonconflict—especiallyaconflictlikeSyria,inwhichjournalistsaremarginal-izedfromtheverybeginning—alackofscrutinymay,infact,inadvertentlyfurtheragendasofsuppression.

Jillian York is the director of inter-national freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the cofounder of Talk Morocco.

2003“SheWasFightingtotheDeath”TheWashingtonPostA front-page story about the capture by Iraqi forces of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch said she fired every bullet she had and suffered numerous wounds. In reality, she never fired a shot and

suffered only broken bones and bruises. Military and government officials inflated her story to spur support for the Iraq War.

2003WMDinIraqTheNewyorkTimes,othersArticles by Judith Miller published in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq cited reports that the country pos-sessed weapons of mass destruction. That was proven not to be the case.

AsamplingoftweetsfromaneffortbyNPR’sAndyCarvintoconfirmAmina’sexistence.

DuringthesixdaysofthesearchforAmina,IwasdirectlyintouchwiththosedoingthediggingandIadmit:Iatfirstresisted—andresented—theirsearch.


challenging ‘he said, she said’ Journalism

A 2009 story in The New York Times aboutadisputeinvolvingFoxNewsdescribedthecablenetworkas“achannelwithareputationforhavingaconservativepointofviewinmuchofitsprogramming.”

Really?Thatphrase“withareputation”put

thereporter,andthenewspaper,atarm’slengthfromthefactthattheFoxNewsChanneldoes have aconservativepointofview,andproudlyso.

Whatwasthepurposeofthatdistanc-ingphrase?

A2011NewYorkTimesarticle,typicalofmanyothers,referredtoJaredLoughneras“themanaccusedofopen-ingfireoutsideaTucsonsupermarket.”WhethertheTucsonshooterisguiltyofmurderisalegalquestion,butthereisnoquestionatallabouthisidentityasthemanwhoshotCongresswomanGabrielleGiffordsandkilledsixpeople.Wedon’thavetosay“accusedof ”—hedidthedeedinfrontofdozensofwitnesses.

I’mnotpickingontheTimes—thenewspaperIreadmostcarefullyaswellastheplaceIworkedfor40years.Andalthoughitisattacked,mostoftenfromtherightbutnotinfrequentlyfromtheleft,forvariouskindsofbias,itactu-ally,inbothitsperformanceanditsideals,epitomizesthecommitmentof

mainstreamjournalismtothegoalsoffairnessandobjectivity.

Thisisnothingnew.AdolphOchs,thefoundingpublisherofthemodernNewYorkTimes,whosebywordwas“withoutfearorfavor,”believedthataresponsiblenewspapershould“reportallsidesofacontroversialissue,andletthereaderdecidethetruth,”accordingtoareminiscencewrittenacoupleofyearsagoforinternaldistributiontotheTimesstaff.

Inthisarticle,Iwillraisesomequestionsabouttheassumptionbehindthatcredo,aswellastheutility,inthismedia-saturatedandcynicalage,ofthesirencallof“fairnessandobjectivity.”

Insidetheprofessionofjournalism,therehasbeenalivelydebategoingonforyearsoverwhetherthe“hesaid,shesaid”format,designedtoavoidtakingsidesoncontentiousissues,impedesratherthanenhancesthegoalofinform-ingthereader.

Thisdebatecomesupmostoftendur-ingpoliticalcampaigns,andmanypresscriticsandcommentatorshavepointedouthowsuperficialandsubjecttomanipulationthatformatcanbeinthecontextofacampaign.Forthatreason,manynewsorganizationsnowpublishorpost“fact-check”boxesthatvettheaccuracyofpoliticaladsorofcandidates’assertionsduringdebates.

LoADEDWoRDSIt’smorechallengingtoquestionthe“hesaid,shesaid”norminothercon-texts.Forinstance,somepeople—manypeople—considerwaterboardingtobetorture,andtheyrefertoitthatway.Butothersclingtothenotionthatitisnottorture.Whatisanewsorganizationtodo?

NPRhaschosentouse“harshinterrogationtactics”or“enhancedinterrogationtechniques”insteadof“torture”whenreportingstoriesaboutwaterboardingandothercoercivepracticesusedtointerrogateterrorismsuspects.Whenlistenerspushedback,AliciaC.Shepard,NPRombudsmanatthetime,respondedthatsheagreedwiththenetwork.“Theproblemisthatthewordtortureisloadedwithpoliticalandsocialimplications,”shewroteonherblog,adding:“NPR’sjobistogivelistenersallperspectives,andpresentthenewsasdetailedaspossibleandputitincontext.”Becauseusingthewordtorturewouldamounttotakingsides,reportersshouldinstead“describethetechniquesandskipthecharacterization”entirely,shesaid.

Again,thatmaybeaneasyexample,becauseit’sbinary—usethewordtorture,oravoidit.Howaboutacom-plexeventorsituationthatrequiresthereportertomakeaseriesofjudgmentsin

Insteadofstrivingforbalance,aveteranSupremeCourtreporterasks,‘Howabouttruthforagoal?’

ByLINDAGREENHouSE


>>>


2003DoctoredPhotoLosAngelesTimesA front-page photo, which also ran in the Chicago Tribune and Hartford Courant, showing a British soldier and Iraqi civilians, was a composite of two photos. When the doctoring was revealed, the photographer was fired.

2004DanRather’sBushPapers“60MinutesII”A report about President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard was based on documents CBS later said it could not prove were authentic.

2006SagoMineDisasterAssociatedPress,CNN,variousnewspapersThe rescue of 13 men trapped underground in a West Virginia mine explosion was reported. Yet 12 had died; only one survived.

ordertodescribeadequatelyandassignprioritiestosuchfactorsasmotivation,relationshipsamongactors,orlikelyconsequences.

PaulTaylor,aformerpoliticalreporterforTheWashingtonPost,hadthistosayinhistrenchantbook,“SeeHowTheyRun:ElectingthePresidentinanAgeofMediaocracy”:

SometimesIworrythatmysqueamish-

nessaboutmakingsharpjudgments,

proorcon,makesmeunfitforthe

slam-bangworldofdailyjournalism.

OthertimesIconcludethatitmakes

meideallysuitedfornewspapering—

certainlyfortherigorsandconventions

ofmodern‘objective’journalism.ForI

candisposeofmydilemmasbywriting

storiesstraightdownthemiddle.Ican

searchforthehalfwaypointbetween

thebestandtheworstthingthatcan

besaidaboutsomeone(orsomepolicy

oridea)andwritemystoryinthat

fair-mindedplace.Byaimingforthe

goldenmean,Iprobablylandnearthe

bestapproximationoftruthmoreoften

thanifIwereguidedbyanyotherset

ofcompasses—partisan,ideological,

psychological,whatever…Yes,I’m

seekingtruth.ButI’malsoseeking

refuge.I’mtakingapassonthetough-

estcallsIface.

JayRosen,apresscriticandjournal-ismprofessoratNewYorkUniversity,callsthephenomenonthatTaylordescribes“regressiontowardaphonymean.”

JoanDidion,waybackin1996,referredto“fairness”asa“familiarnewsroompiety”and“benignideal”that

operatesas“theexcuseinpracticeforagooddealofautopilotreportingandlazythinking.”Whatitoftenmeans,shewrote,“isascrupulouspassivity,anagreementtocoverthestorynotasitisoccurringbutasitispresented,whichistosayasitismanufactured.”

Inthatsameyear,1996,theSocietyofProfessionalJournalistsdropped“objec-tivity”fromitsethicscode,adevelop-mentunderstoodtoreflectthefactthattherehadceasedtobe,ifthereeverwas,acommonunderstandingwithintheprofessionofwhatobjectivereportingconsistsof.

Aleadingcommentaryonthemodernpracticeofjournalism,“TheElementsofJournalism,”byBillKovachandTomRosenstiel,omits“fairness”and“objec-tivity”fromitslistofthe10basicele-mentsofjournalism,describedas“clearprinciplesthatjournalistsagreeon—andthatcitizenshavearighttoexpect.”Whytheomissions?“Familiarandevenuse-ful”astheideaoffairnessandbalancemaybe,theauthorssay,theveryconcept“hasbeensomangled”astohavebecomepartofjournalism’sproblem,ratherthanasolutiontoperceivedproblemsofbiasandpartiality.

ButBrentCunningham,deputyeditoroftheColumbiaJournalismReview,hasobservedthatdespitethisdiscontentand

self-reflection,“nothingreplacedobjec-tivityasjournalism’sdominantprofes-sionalnorm.”Infact,henotes,“acottageindustryofbiaspolicehassprungup,”leadingto“hypersensitivityamongthepresstochargesofbias,”whichinturnreinforcestheproblematicadherencetoastandardof“objectivity”that“cantripusuponthewayto‘truth.’”

Truth.Howabouttruthforagoal?“Wemaynothaveajournalismoftruthbecausewehaven’tdemandedone,”theculturalcriticNealGablerwroteinresponsetothemedia’sperformanceincoveringthehealthcaredebate.He

notedthatbysimplyreportingthelatestguidedmissilefromSarahPalinorRushLimbaugh,themedia“marshalfacts,buttheydon’tseektruth.Theybehaveasifeveryargumentmustbeheardandhasequalmerit,whensomearesimplyspecious.”

Whyisitjustsodifficulttomakethesearchfortruththehighestjournalisticvalue?

Well,foronething,thenotionthatthereexistsoneTruthexistsinsometensionwithcoreFirstAmendmentvalues.Afterall,“theFirstAmendmentrecognizesnosuchthingasa‘false’idea,”theSupremeCourttellsus.Thefamiliarimageofthemarketplaceofideassug-gestsideascompetingfreelyforpublic

‘Wemaynothaveajournalismoftruthbecausewehaven’tdemandedone,’theculturalcriticNealGablerwroteinresponsetothemedia’sperformanceincoveringthehealthcaredebate.


favor,unvetted,unrankedandunregu-latedbysomesuperintendingpower.

Foranotherthing,theword“truth”lacksasingledefinition.Toreport,withoutelaboration,apolitician’schargeconcerningthe“deathpanels”inthehealthcarebillis—assumingthepoliti-cianisquotedaccurately—certainlytoreportthetruth.Doessuchareportcon-veyamoreusefulormeaningfultruth,thecontextualtruthofthesituation?Obviouslynot.Butjustasobviously,itwouldnotrequireacorrection.

In“TheElementsofJournalism,”KovachandRosenstielmakeadis-tinctionbetweentwokindsoftruth:correspondenceandcoherence.“Forjournalism,thesetestsroughlytrans-lateintogettingthefactsstraightandmakingsenseofthefacts.”Theycallfora“journalismofverification”toreplacea“journalismofassertion”:“Amoreconsciousdisciplineofverificationisthebestantidotetobeingoverrunbyanewjournalismofassertion.”

Fairnessandobjectivityshouldberegardedastoolstothatend,theymain-tain,ratherthanasendsinthemselves.

THE‘oTHERSIDE’ThefollowingisacasestudyinwhatIregardastheperilsofthejournalismofassertion,aspracticedbyourfinestnewspaper.

Overthelastfewyears,thenameDavidB.RivkinstartedshowingupinthecolumnsofTheNewYorkTimes.Forexample,inAugust2006,whenafederaldistrictjudgeinDetroitdeclaredthattheBushadministration’swarrantlesswire-tappingprogramwasunconstitutional,RivkinhadthistosayintheTimes:“Itisanappallinglybadopinion,badfrombothaphilosophicalandtechnicalperspective,manifestingstrongbias.”Rivkinwasidentifiedas“anofficialintheadministrationsofPresidentRonaldReaganandthefirstPresidentBush.”

Therewasnoindicationofwhatmighthavegivenhimthe“philosophicalperspective”tocriticizethiscourtdeci-sionsoforcefully,orofwhatevidencehe

possessedof“strongbias”onthepartofthejudge,AnnaDiggsTaylor.

WhenanotherjudgeruledthatsomeprisonersheldbytheUnitedStatesattheBagramAirfieldinAfghanistanhadtherighttopetitionforhabeascorpus,Rivkin“warnedthattheruling‘gravelyundermined’thecountry’s‘abilitytodetainenemycombatantsforthedura-tionofhostilitiesworldwide.’”Thistimehewasidentifiedas“anassociateWhiteHousecounselintheadministrationofthefirstPresidentBush.”Sincethatadministrationhadended16yearsear-lier,IwonderedwhatcurrentexpertiseRivkinpossessedthatledhimtomakesuchaharshassessmentofthisnewdecision.

AcheckoftheTimesdatabaserevealsthatsince2006,Rivkinhasbeenquoted

atleast31timesinarticlesconcerningthedetaineesatGuantanamoBay(12times),detaineesatBagram,executiveprivilegeandpresidentialauthority,targetedkilling,Iraq,AbuGhraib,theperformanceofAttorneyGeneralMichaelMukasey,andtheCentralIntelligenceAgencyanditsinterrogationpolicies.Thedescriptionsofhisroleandhisimpliedexpertisevariedfromstorytostory,butthequotewasalwaystothesameeffect:astrongdefenseofPresidentBushandhispolicies.

TotheextentthatRivkinhasanyrelevantexpertise,thebasisforitisnotdisclosedonhislawfirm’swebsite,whichcontainsalengthybiography.ApartnerintheinternationallawfirmofBakerHostetler,heisidentifiedasa“memberofthefirm’slitigation,inter-

© J.B. Handelsman/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com.


>>>


2008Iran’sMissileTestVariousnewspapersA photograph circulated by the Iranian government purported to show four missiles firing. After the photo ran on the front pages of several papers, including the

Los Angeles Times, and nytimes.com, it was revealed that the fourth mis-sile had failed to fire but the photo had been doctored to make it look like it had.

nationalandenvironmentalgroups.”Theentrydescribeshimashaving“in-depthexperiencewithvariousconstitutionalissuesthatarefrequentlyimplicatedbyfederalregulatorystat-utes,includingcommerceclause-,appointmentsclause-,anddueprocess-relatedissues,aswellasFirstandTenthamendment-relatedmatters.”

Hisqualificationsforpracticinglawintheseareasarenotevident:DuringhisfederalgovernmentserviceintheReaganandfirstBushadministrations,heworkedondomesticregulatoryissues,withaspecialtyinoilandnaturalgas.HeworkedintheOfficeofPolicyDevelopmentintheJusticeDepartmentandworkedforVicePresidentBushaslegaladvisertothecounseltothevicepresident,laterbecomingspecialassis-tantfordomesticpolicytoVicePresidentDanQuayleandassociategeneralcoun-selintheDepartmentofEnergy.

ThemoreIread,themoremystifiedIbecame.AnarticleontheprospectthatPresidentObamamighttransfersomeGuantanamodetaineestotheUnitedStatesincludedawarningfromRivkinthatclassifiedinformationmightbemadepublicduringtrialsinciviliancourts—“adangerthatDavidB.Rivkin,anofficialintheReaganJusticeDepartment,calls‘theconvictionprice.’”

IshouldnotethatRivkin’suseful-nessextendsbeyondthepagesoftheTimes.AWashingtonPostanalysisofthereleaseoftheso-calledtorturememosincludedthisparagraph:“DavidB.RivkinJr.,alawyeratBakerHostetlerwhosupportedthedetaineepolicies,saysthememos’‘carefulandnuancedlegalanalysis’…produced‘eminentlyreason-

ableresults.’”IgivethePostwritercreditforidentifyingRivkinasalawyerinprivatepracticewhosimplysupportsonesideoftheissue.

RivkinevenshowedupinaNewYorkTimesculturalfeatureaboutthedocu-mentary“TaxitotheDarkSide,”whichtookahighlycriticalstancetowardtheBushadministration’sinterrogationpolicies.Rivkin,introducedtoreadersas“alawyerintheadministrationsofPresidentRonaldReaganandthefirstPresidentBush,”becomesthevoiceofthe“otherside”inanaccountofthefilmandinterviewwiththefilmmaker.“It’sprettyclearthatit’snotpolicyandit’sprettyclearthatthesethingsareprosecuted,”Rivkinisquotedassaying.Thearticlegoeson:“Mr.Rivkinsaidthemilitary’sperformancebyhistoricalstan-dardshasbeenquitegoodintherecentconflicts.‘Inallthegoodwars,’hesaid,‘wehavehadsomeprettybadrecords.’”

HowwasitthatRivkinhademerged,Zelig-like,intodailyjournalism?Iaskedreporterswhohadquotedhimwhethertheyhadcalledhimforaquoteorwhetherhehadcalledthem.(Iomitthenamesofthereportersbecausetheydidnotexpecttobeidentifiedinanarticle.)

“Hereachedout,”onetoldme,notingthat“I’veknownhimalongtime.”

AnothersaidhehadbeenreferredtoRivkinbyaconservativethinktank.

“Icalledhim,”anothersaid.“IhavequotedhimafewtimesintheweirdroleofsurrogatefortheBushadministration.…ItwastothepointthatBushadminis-trationofficialswouldsuggesthimwhentheychosenottospeakforthemselvesonGitmo.”

Fromanotherreporter:“IcalledRivkin,whohasbeendefendingtheBushpoliciesforsolong(especiallyinterroga-tion)thatheknowsthemaswellasthehumanrightsfolks.”Notingthatthearticlecontainedcriticismofthepolicies,thereporteradded:“Ithoughtitwouldbeunfairnottomaketheoppositepoint.”

Iprobablydon’thavetotellyouwhatIthinkofthiskindof“reporting.”IfinditparticularlytroublingtouseRivkintocriticizefederalcourtdecisions.Whenafederaldistrictjudgeissuesadecision,thereisno“otherside”tothestory—thedecisionisthedecision.The“otherside”iscontainedinthebriefspresentingtheargumentthatthejudgerejected.Butdiggingupthebriefs,readingthem,andsummarizingthemtakesmoreworkthanacceptinganadhominemsoundbitefromsomeonewillingtoansweranycall.

Iactuallydon’tmeantobecriticalofRivkin,amanwithwhomIhaveaperfectlypleasantpersonalrelation-ship.Asasurrogate,a“go-toproxy,”heissimplyfillingaroleassignedtohimbyreportersand—let’sassume—editorswhoacceptunquestionablythenotionthateverystoryhasanothersidethatitisjournalism’sdutytopresent.Butthereisanothersidetothatstory,too—onethatcallsonjournaliststodotheirbesttoprovidenotjustthefacts,butalso—always—thetruth.

Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the United States Supreme Court, is the Knight Distin-guished Journalist in Residence and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School.


A lawyer who once was a federal prosecutor and counsel to powerful Congressional committees, Melanie Sloan now chases legal and ethical wrongdoing in Congress. As executive director of the nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), she frequently follows up on in-depth reporting in the media. Her team’s investigation of U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, a Democrat, for example, started with a story she read in The New York Times about the number of apartments he was renting in New York at below-market rates.

As her organization keeps an eye on abuses of power on both sides of the aisle, Sloan has also noticed that lobby-ists have gotten more sophisticated in pushing their agendas. Nieman Reports’s Stefanie Friedhoff spoke with Sloan about how journalists are being deceived, how experts with no expertise end up in news articles, and why “he said, she said” reporting isn’t helping. Edited excerpts of the interview follow.

StefanieFriedhoff:CREWhasdocu-mentedhowlobbyists,grassrootsorgani-zations,andotherspecialinterestgroups

succeedingettingbiasedorfalseinfor-mation—oftenpresentedasfactsandexpertadvice—publishedinthemedia.Howdoesthiswork?MelanieSloan:Yes,ithappensallthetime.EveryspecialinterestimaginableseemstobeheadquarteredinD.C.,andsomespeaklouderthanothers,sometimesthankstotheirgreaterfinancialbacking.Theproliferationofcyberadvocacyhasshownthatwhileitmaynowbeeasiertoeducatethepublicaboutimportantissues,thepotentialforabuseisgreaterthanever.

be careful Who You QuoteSomenonprofitsthatclaimtosupplyexpertopinionsaresetupbyspindoctorstofurthercorporateagendas.

MelanieSloan,whoheadsagovernmentwatchdoggroup,seeslobbyistsusingtheWebtomanipulatepublicopinion.Photo © Brooks Kraft/Corbis.


2011GabrielleGiffordsShootingNPR,othersBased on information from the offices of a sheriff and a congress-man, NPR reported on air and online

that the Arizona congresswoman had died. In fact, she survived the shooting in which six others died.

SoURCES: “Getting It Wrong” by W. Joseph

Campbell; “Covering America” by Christopher

Daly; “Poisoning the Press” by Mark Feldstein;

“Journalism’s Roving Eye” by John Maxwell

Hamilton; “Deadline Every Minute” by Joe Alex

Morris, Jr.; “Regret the Error” by Craig Silverman.

CREDITS: p. 6, Wikimedia Commons; p. 8,

Baltimoresun.com; p. 10, Library of Congress;

p. 14, Harvard College Library; p. 16, Los

Angeles Police Department/AP; p. 18, Charles

Bennett/AP; p. 20, Jacqueline Larma/AP; p. 24:

Sepahnews.com/AP.


Canyougiveusafewexamples?RichardBermanstandsoutastheunrivaledkingofmanipulation.YoumaynothaveheardofBerman,butyouhaveundoubtedly—andpossiblyunknowingly—seenhiswork.Herunsthefor-profitpublicrelationsfirmBermanandCompany.Hisparticulargimmickistostartupso-callednonprofitorga-nizations—whichreceivefavorabletaxtreatmentbytheIRS—financedbycorpo-rationswithspecificagendas,butwhichdon’twanttheirfingerprintsonthemes-sage.BermannameshimselfexecutivedirectorofeachorganizationandthencontractswithBermanandCompanytohandletheorganization’sactivities.

ByCREW’scount,hehascreated

morethan25suchgroupsandwebsites,allofwhichare“staffed”bythosewhoworkforhisPRfirm,witheachemployeeholdinganynumberofdifferentposi-tions.OneBermanandCompanystaffer,forexample,atonepointservedasthechiefadministrativeofficerofBermanandCompany,senioreconomicanalystandseniorresearchanalystwiththeEmploymentPoliciesInstitute,govern-mentaffairsdirectorattheCenterforConsumerFreedom,anddirectorofstateaffairs,spokespersonandlobbyistfortheAmericanBeverageInstitute,amongoth-ers.Throughtheseallegedpublicinter-estgroups,Bermanandhis

minionspushtheircorporatesponsors’viewsinthemediaandareregularlycitedinnewsarticlesas“experts”onsubjectsrangingfromlaborlawtodrunkendrivingtochildhoodobesity.Theirreal,well-financedagendaishiddenfromunsuspectingreaders.

GroverNorquistisanotherexample.HeistheheadofAmericansforTaxReform,oftenpaidforhisopinion—andhappytogiveit.PRexecutivesjustknowthatPRfolksaren’tashelpfultotheirissuesashavingnonprofitorganizations.

Whyaren’tjournalistscatchingsuchdeceptions?Onthesurface,thesepeoplelooklikelegitimateexperts.AndIthinkmany

journalistsdon’tnecessarilylookatthemotivationsoftheirsources.It’sobviouswhenyou’retalkingtoapoliticalcam-paign,butotherthanthatIdon’tthinkreporterslookcloselyenough.Youhavetocheckthebackground.Whatcanyoufindthatlegitimatestheirexpertise?

Ithinkthecultureofreportingtwosidestoeveryissueisalsopartoftheproblem.

youmeanthe“hesaid,shesaid”styleofreporting?Yes.Frequently,anarticlewillreportthispersonsaidXandthispersonsaidY,as

if,therefore,they

arebothequivalentwhenusuallyoneislyingormisstatingasmuchaspos-sible—ormaybetheybothare—butquitefrequentlyitsoundsasthoughtheyarejusttwoequallyvalidopinions.Some-timesthereisn’tanotherside,likethereactuallyisnotanothersidetoclimatechange.Youcandiscussdegrees,buttheconceptthatyoucanhaveanarticlethatsays“thereisclimatechange,thereisnotclimatechange”isridiculous.

Withrespecttoclimatechange,though,thisischanging,isn’tit?overthepastdecade,ithasbecomethemostfre-quentlycitedexampleoftheshortcom-ingsof“hesaid,shesaid”reporting.Yes,butinterestingly,westillhaveit.WearestillhavingSenatorJimInhofetellyouthereisnoclimatechangeandtheHeartlandInstituteisstillfundingallthesepeopletosaythesamething.Andtheyarebeingquotedinthemedia.Thereisanewbookout[“PrivateEmpire:ExxonMobilandAmericanPower”bySteveColl]thatdetailshowExxonMobilhasfundedhugenumbersofthinktankswhowillthenputoutexperts’reportssayingthereisnoclimatechange.Youcanseethesametechniquesusedwithsubjectslikechildhoodobesity,whereso-calledexpertsfundedbythesodaindus-tryandthejunkfoodindustrysaythereisnoproblemwithchildhoodobesityinAmerica.Again,youcandifferonyoursolutionsbuttheproblemisprettyclear.

Politicalfactcheckinghasbeenontheriseinrecentyears,onlineandinprint.Isthatmakingadifference?Ithinkthat’shelpful,butIdon’tknowhowmanypeoplereadthoselittle

Inoweducatenewreportersallthetime.Theamounttheydon’tknowisstunning—andit’snottheirfault.Theyaresmart,butthere’snoexperience.


sidebars,whereasawholelotofpeopleseetheadsinthefirstplace.Anditisnotlikeeverynewsarticleincludesthat.Mostofthenewfactcheckingisreallylimitedtowhatpoliticalcampaignssay.

Haveyouhadconversationsaboutthiswithjournalists?That’strickybecausethenyouareattackingreporters’abilitiesandmeth-ods.Ialsothinkalotofjournaliststhesedayshavesomuchpressureonthemtoproducequicklyandtoproducefortheblogeverydayontopofthenewspaperstories,andwithfewercolleaguesbecausepapersaredownsizingsomuch,theyjustdon’thavethetimetocheck.Theydon’thavetheresources.

yousoundconcernedaboutcurrentchangesinjournalism.Yes.Thereisthisconceptof“wintheday”inWashington;thenewscycleissoshortthatitdoesn’tgivejournalists

thetimetothinkthroughthosestories.Reportersareoftenchangingeveryyearortwonowanditisveryeasytospinareporterwhodoesn’tknowwhattheyaretalkingabout.Youjustcan’tdipyourtoeintosomethingliketaxesorcampaignfinance.Inoweducatenewreportersallthetime.Theamounttheydon’tknowisstunning—andit’snottheirfault.Theyaresmart,butthereisnoexperience.Sothereisnolong-termmemorytounder-standthatthere’sacontexttowhat’shappening.

OneplacewhereyouactuallyseeadifferenceisSupremeCourtreporting.Thosejournalistsdoitforareallylongtime,theyarecareful,andtheygiveyouaperspectiveofwhatreallyhappened.

Arepoliticalbloggersfillingsomeofthevoid?Idon’tknow.Idon’tthinktheblogo-sphereisnecessarilydoingusgreatfavorsinnewsrightnow.It’slikethey’re

allequaleventhoughtheydon’tchecksourcesandthey’llpostalmostevery-thing.Youreallysawthatatworkinaterriblewayinthe‘NikkiHaleyabouttobeindicted’case.Howunfairtothatpoorwoman.Prettysooneverybodyreportedit[arumorthatoriginatedonalittle-knownblogandwentviralonTwitter],eventhoughtherewasnoevidencewhat-soever.Thiswasnotaone-timething.

Also,somuchofourInternetculturenowisthatdriveformorecontent.IfIwentthroughTheDailyCaller,TheDailyBeast,TalkingPointsMemo,andalltheotherblogs,mydaywouldbegone.Whocandothat?Sopeoplearejustpickingthesourcestheyreallylike.It’sgivingyouonlythecontentthatyou’relikelytoalreadyagreewith.

Dononprofitwatchdogshaveanimpact?Ithinkso,yes.MorenonprofitgroupsliketheCenterforPublicIntegrity,ProPublicaortheSchusterInstituteforInvestigativeJournalismarepickinguptheroleofinvestigativereporting.Andyou’reseeinggoodreportinginthattheydon’thaveasmuchpressuretogetoutastoryaday.Althoughanotherpres-suretheyhaveisnotinsignificanteitherbecausetheyhavedonorswhowanttoseethatthey’remakingadifference.Asadonor-supportedorganization,[weknow]theywanttoseethatyou’vedonesomethingallthetime,andsoyou’reconstantlyprovingyourworth.

you’reanexpert.Howdoyoudecidewhentotalktoareporterandwhentodecline?Igetaskedquestionsallthetime,andIwillfrequentlysayI’mnotreallythebestpersonforthat.ButthenIwillsometimesreadinthepapersomebodyelse’squoteonthatsubject,andIthink,‘‘Wow,that’sreallynotwhoIwouldhavethoughtofasanexpertonthateither.”WhenyouareinWashington,partofgameistobeinthemediaalotbecauseyouwanttobetheexpertthatpeoplegoto.Butpeopleshouldsay“No”whentheyreallydon’tknowthesubjectmatter.

CREW’sMelanieSloaninAprilatthesigningofabilltoclampdownoninsiderstocktradingbyfederallawmakers.Photo by Carolyn Kaster/The Associated Press.



taking on the rumor mill

Bodies in the lake. Bodies on top of themall.Bodieshiddenbycityofficialsinalockersomewhereoutsideoftown.

Noneofthoserumors,whichemergedinthewakeoftheApril27,2011tornadothathitTuscaloosa,Alabama,killing53people,turnedouttobetrue.Butthatdidn’tstopthemfromspreadingand,insomecases,beingpickedupandper-petuatedbyothermediaoutlets.

Duringtimesofcrisis,newsorga-nizationsoftenfindthemselvesupagainstawall,balancingthedemandsofspeedwithacommitmenttotruth.Thatbalancingacthasneverbeenmoreimportant—ormoredifficult—thannow,whenthecompetitionof24-hournewschannelsandtheinstantaneousnatureofsocialmediatoolslikeTwitterandFacebookmakenewsgatheringhardertodothoroughlyandaccurately.

Beforethetornado,TheTuscaloosaNewshadbeenlikemanyothersmall-tomedium-sizednewspapersinitsuseofsocialmedia.Wehadheldatleast

onesession,ledbyourownonlinestaff,onthebasicsofusingTwitterandFacebooktodisseminateinformation.WhileoursportsreporterswerealreadyproficientwithTwitter,usingittoupdatefansinrealtimeoneverythingfromgamescorestoplayercomments,onlyahandfulofnewsreportershadFacebookpagesorTwitteraccounts.Severalflat-outrefusedtousethenewtechnologies,maintainingthatthelossofprivacywasnotworththeeffort.

Butwhilemostofusunderstoodtheusefulnessofsocialmediaintheabstract,thosemethodswerenotseam-lesslyintegratedintothenewsroom’soperationsandwereusedonlyspo-radically,usuallyduringbreakingnewseventsortofindsourcesforstories.

EMERGENCyDRILLTwoweeksafterweheldourfirstsocialmediasession,thetornadohit.Itwasatruetestofhowwellweabsorbedthatrecentinformation.Withcellphones

unabletoconnectcallsandelectricitydownalloverthecity,includinginthenewsroom,thepublichadfewwaysofgettingaccurateinformationexceptthroughsmartphones.

Wediscoveredthatadisasterisready-madeforsocialmediatools,whichprovidetheimmediacyneededforreportingbreakingnews.Ourreportersandphotographerswereonthestreetwithinminutesofthestorm,tweetingandpostingphotosofthedevastation.

Thesimpleeloquenceofaphotooratwo-sentencetweetcannotbediscounted:Onereporterwhoseapartmentwasdestroyedtweetedthatfact,aswellasaphotooffirefightersdiggingagirloutoftherubbleofwhatusedtobehishome.Thatstarkdetailbroughthometoread-ers—andtoothersinthenewsroom—justhowmuchthedisasterhadaffectedusall.

Itwasobviousthatwewereoneofthefewavailablemediaoutletsthatwasbothonthegroundandcouldaccuratelyfilltheinformationhole.Reporters’tweets

Inthewakeofatornado,TheTuscaloosa(Ala.)Newsmovedswiftlytosortfactfromfiction.

BykATHERINEk.LEE

What can we learn from traditional newsrooms that have transitioned well to covering breaking news on multiple platforms in real time? What happens to accuracy and verification in the process? Nieman Reports asked editors at two papers recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Board to share their experiences.


andphotoswereaggregatedtothepaper’swebsiteandFacebookpagesopeoplecouldseeacontinuousstreamofinforma-tionintheminutesimmediatelyafterthestormhit.Withinthefirst24hours,wealsocreatedaGoogleDocsspreadsheetonthewebsitetoallowreaderstoposttheirowninformation,whethertheywereseekingmissinglovedonesorhopingtoreassuretheirfamiliesthattheyweresafe.

Suchimmediateinformationwasalsoaservicethepublicneeded.Peopleknewwherethedestructionwas,whatstreetstoavoid,andwheretogoforhelp.NationalGuardofficialstoldeditorsafterwardthattheyreliedinitiallyontheTwitterfeedonTheTuscaloosaNewswebsitetoshowthemwheretodeployfirstresponders.

THEDEBuNkINGBLoGButwhilereportingthebasicsofadisaster—thenumberofdead,thestreetsthatwereimpassable,availableemer-gencyservices—isaneasytaskforskilledreporters,oneissuecroppedupthatwecouldnotimmediatelygetahandleon:rumors.Peopleseemtofinditeasier tobelieverumorsthattheywishweretrueorthatseemtofulfilladesiretoheartheworst.Thatmightexplainwhypeoplecontinuedtoinsist,daysafterthestorm,thatthecitywashidinghundredsofbod-iesinasecretcoolereventhoughthelistofmissinggrewsmallereachday,and,asthepolicechiefrepeatedlysaid,thecityhadnoreasontohidethedead.

Tothatend,Newseditorscreatedablogtoprobesomeofthemorepersis-tentrumors,trackingwheretheymighthaveoriginatedandtalkingwithofficialstogetthefacts.Theformatfitthenatureofthestorywell.Trackingtherumors,withtheirever-changingdetails,inprintwouldhavebeenslowandawkward,andtheblogallowedustoupdatequickly.Wealsohadthefreedomtoadoptamorecasualtonetodispelsomeofthemoreridiculousrumors,whichmadeformoreentertainingreading.

Theblogformatalsogavereadersaspacetoweighinwiththeirownevidence,whichprovedveryuseful.Oneofthemore

Afteradeadlytornado,TheTuscaloosa(Ala.)NewsfoundthatTwitterandothersocialmediaprovidedtheimmediacyneededforreportingbreakingnewsanddispellingrumors.



persistentrumorsclaimedthatseveralchildrendiedwhileattendingapartyatalocalChuckE.Cheese’sthatwasdestroyed.Amanageratthatrestau-rantwasabletodebunktherumorbypostingontheblogthatsheherselfhadclosedithoursbeforethestorm.

Intheyearsincethetornado,NewsstaffershavelearnedhowtomoreactivelyincorporateTwitterandFacebookintotheirjobs.ReportersnowtweetfrommeetingsatCityHallwithperiodicupdatesoncouncilmembers’votes.TheylinktostoriesonFacebooktosolicitfeedbackfromreaders.

Severaltimeseachday,wepostadvanceversionsofstoriesonthewebsite,whichallowsustotakeamoreanalytical,second-dayapproachwiththeversionsofthosestoriesfortheprinteditionthenextday.Ourpublicsafetyreportermaintainsacrimeblogthatsheupdatesseveraltimesadaywithreportsofcriminalactivity.Ithasbecomeoneofthemostwidelyreadfeaturesonourwebsite.

Incorporatingsocialmediaandnewtechnologycontinuestobealearningprocessforanewsorganiza-tionthatstillreliesheavilyonprinttoconveyinformation.Likemostothermediaoutlets,wearestillhavingconversationsabouthowbesttousethesetoolstoenhanceournewsgath-eringandhowtohandletheuniquechallengesthatalmost-instantaneousdispersalofnewscanpose.

Butnewsroomresistancetousingthesetoolshaslargelydieddown,nowthatwehavebeenconfrontedwithstarkevidenceofhowusefultheycanbetothenewsgatheringprocessandtoreaderswhoareincreasinglyingest-ingnewsinuntraditionalways.

Katherine K. Lee is city editor of The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News. The paper won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its cov-erage of the tornado on April 27, 2011.

the story that rocked the clock

After a string of breaking news thatstretchedoverweeks,anuneasycalmhadfinallysettledoverMadison,Wisconsin,byearlyMarch2011.

AmonthearlierGovernorScottWalkerhaddropped“thebomb,”ashewouldlatercallhiscontroversialdeci-siontoeffectivelywipeoutcollectivebargainingforpublicemployees.TensofthousandsofprotestersswampedthestateCapitol,andthereporters,photog-raphersandeditorsattheMadison-based

WisconsinStateJournalstrainedtocovereverydevelopmentthatensued:TheSen-ate’sminorityDemocratsfledtoIllinoistodenytheRepublicansaquorum.Schoolsclosedwhenthousandsofteachersjoinedtheprotests.Demonstratorsoccupiedthestate’sornateCapitolbuilding24hoursaday,turningitintoaprotestvillage.

Eachdaybroughtanumberofdevelopmentsthattaxedthenewspaper’stwoStatehousereportersandforcedustoabandonbeatcoverageelsewhereto

‘Withsomuchnewsbreaking,justpostingupdatestothepaper’swebsitesuddenlyfeltinadequate.Weneededtomeetreaderswheretheywere…’

ByPHILBRINkMAN

DemonstratorsinsidetheCapitolinMadison,Wisconsin,cheerinFebruary2011asthedeadlinedrewneartovacatethepremisesorfacearrest.Photo by Craig Schreiner/Wisconsin State Journal.


throwmorebodiesatthestory.Withsomuchnewsbreaking,justpostingupdatestothepaper’swebsitesuddenlyfeltinadequate.Weneededtomeetread-erswheretheywereexperiencingthestory:ontheircellphones,onFacebook,andespeciallyonTwitter.SeveralofusalreadyhadTwitterandFacebookaccounts,buttheseweremostlyorna-ments.TheeventsofFebruaryandMarch2011forcedustointegratesocialmediaintoeverythingwedo.

Weactedinpartoutofself-preser-vation.IftheInternetistheequivalentofgivingeverycitizenaprintingpress,Twitterislikegivingeverypersonhisorherowntalkradioshow:loudandhighlychargedinterpretationsofthenews,broadcasttohundredsorthousandsoffollowers.AsMadisonburned,thecacophonyofvoiceswasdeafening.Thepaperriskedbeingcrowdedout,thehardworkofitsindependentandwell-sourcedreporterseclipsedbypartisans.

Webeganbycapturinganaudienceofourown.Equippedwithsmartphones,ourCapitolreporterstweetedupdatesseveraltimesaday,oftenbreakingnewsonTwitterevenbeforeinformingtheireditors.Whentheprotestsstarted,reporterMarySpicuzzahadperhaps500followersonTwitter.Today,some3,600peoplehangonhereverytweet.

Othersneededtobebroughtuptospeedinahurry.Weimprovised,provid-ingsomereporterswithiPodtouchesandmobilehotspots,andsettingthemupwithTwitteraccountsbeforesendingthemoutthedoor.Bythefirstweekendofprotests,wehadninereportersinthefield,allofthemtweetingandcontribut-ingtoaliveblog,whichdrew24,000readersovertwodays.(Bycomparison,theStateJournal’scirculationisaround83,000dailyand118,000Sunday.)

Asasourceoftips,Twitterwasindis-pensable,openinguplisteningpostsacrossthestateandacrossthepoliticalspectrumthatcouldquicklyinfluencecoverageplansfortheday.Ofcourse,thedownsideofsomuchfeedbackisthatitcanquicklybecomeoverwhelming.

Ibeganreactingtothemerestdevelop-mentlikeajumpydaytrader,sendingSpicuzzaandfellowreporterClayBarbourdownendlessrabbitholestocheckouteveryrumor:No,policewerenotmassinginriotgearontheedgeofthecity.No,theadministrationwasnotsealingthewindowsoftheCapitolshut.

Overtime,wegotbetteratsiftingoutthechatter.Wealsoknewwecouldn’triskthenewspaper’scredibilitybytweetingunverifiedinformation.Whatemergedwasacommon-sensepolicyakintothepaper’sbanonwritingoffthepolicescanner:Don’tforwardtweetsfromunknownorunreliablesources.Don’tretweetclaimsthathaven’tbeenindependentlyverified.Sticktothefacts.

Ofcourse,thoseoutsidethepaperweren’tboundbyanysuchconstraints.Withangeronbothsidesatafeverpitch,themediacouldnotescapebecomingpartofthestory.ThereweredailyTwitterandFacebookcampaignstakingissuewithourcoverage;knowing,conspirato-rialtreatisesthatonlysomeoneignorantofthemuchmorebanalinnerworkingsofanewspapercouldconjure.Respondingtothosechargeswastemptingbutoftencreatedmoretroublethanitwasworth.

GoINGVIRALByearlyMarch,everyonewasexhausted,beatup,andbadlynourished.Thestale-mateintheSenateatleastallowedustocatchourbreath.“Normalcyisreturn-ing,”readoneheadlineonMarch8.

At4p.m.thenextday,theSenatecamebackinasurprisesession.Spicuzzalearnedthataconferencecommitteehadbeenhastilycalledforthatdaytoapprovethecollectivebargainingbillandsenditbacktobothhousesforafinalup-or-downvote.Sheimmediatelytweetedthat,butnoneofusknewwhatitmeant.Thebillhadn’tpassedtheSenateduetotheDemocrats’boycott.Howcoulditsud-denlyshowupinaconferencecommit-tee,whichtypicallyironsoutdifferencesbetweencompetingversionsoflegislationpassedbybothhouses?

WhileSpicuzzaandBarbourchased

downlegislatorsandtheirattorneys,theycontinuedtweetingandphoninginupdatestoastorydevelopingonline.Thestorywentviral.Withinanhour,SpicuzzacouldseepeoplerunningtowardtheCapitol,andtherotundaonceagainbeganfillingwithsinging,chantingprotesters.Afterabriefandemotionallychargedmeeting,thecommitteechairmanhammeredthebillthrough.Halfanhourlater,thebillpassedtheSenate;inthemorningitwouldpasstheAssembly.Thetrick,itturnedout,hadbeentoremovefiscalelementsfromthebillsothatthequorumrequiredwassmalleranditcouldbepassedwithouttheDemocrats.

Anotherspasmofstoriesfollowed,andtheeventsofthatwinterrever-beratedoverthenextyearasrecallcampaignswerelaunchedagainstthegovernorandotherelectedofficials.

Noteverythingwetriedworked.Sometimeswetweetedimportantdevelopmentsbutneglectedtoreprisethoseinprint,forgettingthatthetwoplatformsservedlargelydifferentaudi-ences.Iwishthatsomedayswehadheldbackmorereporterstodevelopmeatierenterprisestories(wecarvedouttimeforseveralofthese,butnotenough).

Andwecontinuetostrugglewiththebalancebetweenimmediacyandcredibility.LikenewsroomsacrossAmerica,theStateJournalhashadtomakeconsiderablecutbacksinstaffinrecentyears.Atthesametime,we’veseverelyflattenedthetimereportershavetoformulatequestions,evaluatetheanswers,andpresentinformationinacomprehensibleway.Ourchallengeistokeepthesenewtoolsfromhijackingourmainpurpose,whichremainsthetime-consumingworkofcultivatingsources,diggingthroughrecords,analyzingdata,andholdingpublicofficialsaccountable.

Phil Brinkman is the city editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, which was a 2012 Pulitzer finalist for its breaking news coverage of 27 days of around-the-clock protests at the state Capitol in Madison.


FEATuRE:ACoNTRoVERSIAL SToRY

As I watched media coverage of the raciallychargedshootingdeathofTrayvonMartininFloridaearlierthisyear,Ifoundmyselfthinkingaboutsensitivityandrespect.ThoseissueswerebigonesformeandTheBuffaloNewsinNewYorktwosummersago.

AsGeraldoRiveraofFoxNewsdeclaredthatblackteensshouldavoidwearinghoodedsweatshirtsandsomespectatorsgleefullywelcomedrevela-tionsaboutMartin’sless-then-angelicpastbehavior,allofthequestionscamefloodingback.Howcanwebestavoidblamingthevictim?Doesn’tthepublichavetherighttoknowallthefacts,notjusttheonesthatsupportaparticularpointofview?Howdoplacementandemphasis(innewspaperterms,afront-pageheadlineversusthreeparagraphsattheendofastory)figureintomediadecision-making?Howdoesthedesiretobeprovocative(considerRivera’sMarch22tweet:“HishoodiekilledTrayvonMartinassurelyasGeorgeZimmerman”)weighagainstresponsiblecommentaryandreporting?

Asrace-orientedstoriescontinueto

emerge—andtheysurelywill—thosequestionsdeservetobethoughtaboutandtalkedaboutinnewsrooms.Andwecandothatmosteffectivelyifwebroadenthebaseofthoseinourcon-versations,recognizingthatdiversityismorethannumbers;it’sthepowerofwhathappenswhendifferentvoicesaretrulyheard.ThisrealitywasbroughthometomeintheaftermathofthefurorthateruptedinBuffalo’sblackcommu-nityoverastorytheNewspublishedinAugust2010.

ouToFCoNTRoLThebloodiestcrimeinthecity’srecenthistorybeganasaweddingparty.Actu-ally,itwasayear-after-the-weddingpartyforaBuffalocouplewhohadmovedtoTexasandmarriedtherebuthadcomebacktocelebratewithhome-townfriends.ThesettingwasCityGrill,anupscalerestaurantdowntown.

Thepartygotrowdy.Thenitgotoutofcontrol,somuchsothatthepropri-etorsdecidedtocloseitdown.BouncersshooedthecrowdoutontoMainStreet.Gunfireblastedout.

By3a.m.,eightpeoplehadbeenshot.Fourofthemultimatelydied;theotherswereseriouslyinjured.Amongthedeadwasthe30-year-oldbridegroom,DanyellMackin.Hiswife,Tanisha,wasunhurt.

InthedaysandweeksthatfollowedtheshootingonAugust14,2010,thecommunity’sreactionincludednotonlygriefandshockbutalsoanger—angeroverdeep-seatedissuesinvolvingraceandsocioeconomicdisparityinBuffalo,oneofthepoorestandmostsegregatedcitiesinthenation.

Allofthevictimswereblack,aswas23-year-oldRiccardoMcCray,whowaseventuallyconvictedofmurderandsen-tencedtolifeinprisonwithoutparole.

OneflashpointfortheangerwasastorythatranonthefrontpageoftheSundayBuffaloNews,eightdaysaftertheshootingandonthesamedaywecoveredthefuneralofoneofthevictims.Itsheadline:“7of8shootingvictimshadcriminalpast.”Itreportedthatfiveofthevictimswereconvictedfelons,withchargesincludingweaponspossession,recklessendangerment,drugpossession,andarmedrobbery.

aFtEr thE shoutIng, brIdgIng thE dIVIdE‘…ournewsroomhasmadeaseriousefforttoforgeastrongerconnectionbetweenthepaperandBuffalo’sblackcommunity.…NotforamomentdoIbelievethehealingiscomplete.Butwe’vemadeastart.’

ByMARGARETSuLLIVAN


Thestorywenttogreatlengthstomakethepointthatnooneintendedtoblamethevictims.Thefirstquotewasfromalocalcriminaljusticepro-fessorwho,afternotingthatafelonyprosecutionorconvictionincreasesthestatisticallikelihoodofbecomingacrimevictim,said,“Itdoesn’tmeanthatthepeopledeserveditorinanywayhaditcoming.”

Butmanymembersoftheblackcom-munitywereenraged.Afewdaysafterthestoryran,aformergangmemberturnedcommunityactivist,DarnellJackson,ledaprotestoutsidetheNewsbuilding,whichislessthanhalfamilefromCityGrill.Onebyone,copiesofthepaperwith

thecontroversialarticleweretossedontoatrash-canfire.HeledasimilarprotestinanEastSidebackyard.ThelocalTVmediacoveredthecriticismoftheircompetitionwithacertainamountofglee:“OutragedcommunityburnsBuffaloNews”readtheheadlineonCBS-affiliateWIVB-TV’swebsite.

Soon,thenationalmediawascover-ingthecontroversy.IfoundmyselfonCNN,amongotheroutlets,defendingmydecisiontorunthestory.Foritwasmydecision.Ireaditbeforeitran,anddiscussedwithothereditorshowandwheretodisplayit.Ithoughtthestorywasimportantbecauseithelpedmakesenseofwhathappenedthatnight.

ANGRyCRoWDAsthecontroversyraged,ImadeafewphonecallstoblackleadersinBuffalotoletthemknowthatIwaswillingtoexplainmydecisionandtohearcomplaintsfromtheblackcommunity.Oneofthoseleaderswasaprominentminister,theRev.DariusPridgen.HetookmeuponmyofferandinvitedmetoacommunitymeetingatTrueBethelBaptistChurchonBuffalo’slargelyblackEastSide.

ItwasnotthecozychataroundatablethatIhadenvisioned.Sevenhundredangrypeoplefilledthechurch,someholdingsignscriticizingthepaperandme.Themeetinghadbeenwellpublicizedandemotionswererunning

BuffaloNewseditorMargaretSullivandrewnationalmediaattentionforherhandlingofacontroversialstory.Photo by Derek Gee/The Buffalo News.


FEATuRE:ACoNTRoVERSIAL SToRY

high.Alecternwithasoundsystemensuredthateveryoneinthepackedchurchcouldhear.Perhapsadozenspeakersprecededme:familymembersofthevictims,ministers,publicoffi-cials.Theyallhadessentiallythesamemessage,anditwasdirectedatmeandthenewspaper:You’vetreatedusdisrespectfully.

“Ifeelthatwewerevictimizedtwice,”saidCherylStevens,whoseson-in-lawwasthebridegroomwhodiedintheshooting.“Whatyoudidtouswasyoupouredsaltonthewoundsthathadnotevenhealed.”

WhenPridgenspoketothegroup,heattemptedtoprovideperspective:“Thismeetingisnotdesignedtobeacombatsession,butanightofprogression.…Itisourhopethattonightwillnotbeaone-stopmeeting…thatthisdialoguetakesustoanotherlevelofunderstand-ingandunityinourcommunity.”

Thateveningwasoneofthemostdifficulttimesofmylife.Thesheerdis-connectbetweenalargesegmentofthecommunityanditsnewspaperstunnedme,asdidthedepthandintensityofthepeople’sanger.

AsIwroteinaNewscolumnafewweekslater:“Icansay,withoutexaggera-tion,thatIleftthatmeetingbothshakenandchanged.IstillbelieveTheNewswasrighttopublishthestorybecauseitexposedanimportantpieceofthepuzzleaboutthattragicshooting.Butitstimingandplacementshouldhavebeenhandledmoresensitivelyandmorerespectfully.”

REACHINGouTSincetheCityGrillcrisis,ournewsroomhasmade aseriousefforttoforgeastrongerconnectionbetweenthepaperandBuffalo’sblackcommunity.Amongotherinitiatives,we:

nBeganadiversityadvisorycouncil,madeupofcommunitymembers,thatmeetswithkeyeditorsfourtimesayear.Nowinitssecondroundofmem-bers,thecurrentincarnationincludesDarnellJackson,theleaderofthe

burn-the-Newsprotest.Theirperspec-tiveshavehelpedusbetterunderstandthecommunity—andthey’vegivenussomegoodstoryideas.

nMadeaconcertedefforttoreachouttotheblackcommunity.Wedistributedpamphletsexplaininghowtogetsto-riesintothepaperandhowtocontacteditorsandreporters.Weattendedcommunityeventstospeakorjustmeetpeople.

nHiredanoutsidefirmtoprovidediversityawarenesstrainingforalargegroupofeditorsandreporters.

nStartedaregularseriesofstorieshigh-lightingpositiveaspectsofBuffalo’sEastSide.

Coincidentally,InamedLisaWilsonasexecutivesportseditor;sheis,webelieve,theonlywomanofcolorhead-ingametropolitannewspaper’ssportsdepartment. Iwasdeeplygrateful

throughouttheCityGrillepisodetohavethecounselandsupportofblackjournalistsattheNews,severalofwhomaccompaniedmetothechurchmeeting.Amongthemwasurbanaffairseditorandaward-winningcolumnistRodWatson,nowthepointpersoninourcommunityoutreachefforts.

Thereisnoquestionthatmorediversenewsroomsmakeforbettercommunitycoverage.Imadeastrongdiversity-hiringpushsoonafterbecomingeditorin1999,increasingminority-grouprepresentationtoabout14.5percentofournewsroom’sfull-timeemployees,asignificantjumpfromthe7percentIinherited,butstilllessthanthe20percentminoritypopula-tioninourmajorcirculationarea.

I’malsohappytohavenamedDawn

MarieBracelyasthefirstblackwomanonthepaper’seditorialboardandtohaveotherblackjournalistsinkeyroles.Inthiseraofshrinkingnewsroomsandlittlehiring,thepushfordiversityhasbeensidetrackedthroughoutthecountry,butformanyreasonsitremainscrucialtooursuccess.

IseverythingallbetternowinBuf-falo?Certainlynot.Decadesofresent-mentdon’tdissipateinamatterofmonths.Butit’sfairtosaythatwe’vemadeprogress.Andtheeffortshavebeennoticed.AblackreporterontheNews’sstaff,DeidreWilliams,attendsDariusPridgen’sTrueBethelBaptistChurch,thesceneofmymeetingwiththeblackcommunity.

Shestoppedintoseemeafewweeksagotoreportthat,fromthepulpitoneSundaymorning,PridgenexplainedhisdecisiontosellTheBuffaloNewsinthechurchvestibule.Heheldupthatday’s

edition,whichincludedanextensivefeaturestoryonEvaDoyle,whoselife’sworkhasbeenteachingblackhistory.

WilliamsrelatedwhatPridgentoldhiscongregationthatday:“TheBuffaloNewssaidtheyweregoingtomakesomechanges,andtheyhave.Theykepttheirword.”

NotforamomentdoIbelievethehealingiscomplete.Butwe’vemadeastart.Ilearnedagreatdealfromwhathappened—thatstoriesareonethingandthatpeople’slivesandtheirfeelingsarequiteanother.Asjournalists,it’shardtomakepeacebetweenthosetwocompetingvalues,butwehavetotry.

Margaret Sullivan is the editor of The Buffalo News.

IseverythingallbetternowinBuffalo?Certainlynot.Decadesofresentmentdon’tdissipateinamatterofmonths.Butit’sfairtosaythatwe’vemadeprogress.Andtheeffortshavebeennoticed.


FIndIng strEngth In numbErs

I remember when I finally got seriousaboutworkingwithdata.Itwasthethird(orwasitthefourth?)timeIhadtakenacrashcourseincomputer-assistedreporting.Reporterswhohavegonethroughthistrainingknowthedrill:YoulearnhowtouseExcelinaday,endingwithsomethingcalleda“pivottable.”MymomentofresolvecamewhenIwaslearningyetagainhowtomakeoneofthosetables.Iwasevenusingthesamedataasbefore:baseballplayers’salaries.Ithought,“That’sit.I’msickoflearningandforgetting.It’stimeforachange.”

IpitchedmybossesattheMilwaukeeJournalSentinelonattendingtheweek-longbootcamphostedbyInvestigativeReportersandEditors(IRE).Ihopedtofinallypushpastthispivottablebusinessandlearnhowtodrawusefulinforma-tionoutofdatabases.Ididn’twanttobethedatabaseguyatourpaper.Wealreadyhadone.Ijustwantedtogetpastbeingabeginner.

Bysomeaccounts,atage40,Iwaslatetothedatagame.ButIwasn’tdeterred.IfiguredthatifIcan’tlearnnewskills,Iprobablyamnotlongforthisfast-changingbusinessanyway.TheIREtraininginMissourisealedthebasicsforme.

NowIwasthinkingindatabasespeak,butIknewIhadtousemyskillsorrisklosingthem.Ididn’twanttotrolltheWebfordata.Thatwasbackwardtome.Oneofthekeystogettingthetrain-ingwheelsoffwastofindastorythatrequireddataskills.Forme,itwaslikeknowingthattogetfromheretothereIhadtolearntorideabikesoIdid.

Mybreakthroughstorygrewoutofmyreportingonagunshopthatwasoneofthenation’stopsellersofgunsrecovered

incriminalinvestigations.Thedealerhadsurrenderedhislicenseratherthanhaveitberevoked.Theshop’snamechangedanditwasnowbeingoperatedbyarelativeofthedealer.Theswitchwipedawayallofthestore’sfederalviolations.Iwantedtofindoutifotherstoresaroundthecountryhaddonethesamething.

DatabaseskillswerejustwhatIneeded.Iobtainedtwodatabases,oneofgundealerswhoselicenseshadbeenrevokedandoneofcurrentgundealers—onefromtheWeb,theotherthroughapublicrecordsrequest.Throughmyanalysis,Ifoundabout150storeswhoselicenseshadbeenrevokedthoughtheylookedtostillbeinbusiness.TwocolleaguesandIcontactedthesedeal-ers.Morethan50admittedthatthepersonwhoselicensehadbeenrevokedremainedclosetotheoperation.

IbroughtmyfindingstotheU.S.BureauofAlcohol,Tobacco,FirearmsandExplosives.Thebureauhadneverdoneasimilaranalysisbutofficialswerenotsurprised.Theyknewaboutthepracticeandevenhadanameforit—“phoenixrisingfromtheashes”—butwerelargelypowerlesstostopit.

“WipedClean,”theseriesaboutgundealers,wasrecognizedwithaGeorgePolkAward.Iamconvincedthatitwouldnothavebeenpossiblewithoutthedatabasework.Butthelessonwasthat dataalonewasnotenough.Thenumbershadtobebackedupbyold-fashionedreporting.

Aftertheserieswaspublished,IknewIhadtokeepusingtheskillsorlosethem.OnetipIalwayspassonistouseExcelforeverydaywork.Iuseitformysourcelistsandstoryideasandtokeeptrackofmyrequestsforpublicrecords.IalsouseittomaketimelinesasIbegin

anyinvestigation.Iopeniteveryday.AsIcontinuedtouseMicrosoft’s

databaseprogram,Access,Iwantedtotakeanotherstepandlearncomputermapping.Igotthatopportunityin2011whenmywife,RaquelRutledge,wasawardedaNiemanFellowship.Asanaffiliate,ItookaclassatHarvardandlearnedtousemappingsoftwaretoanalyzedata.Forinstance,Iexaminedwherehomicidesoccurredandlayeredotherdata,includingother crimes,homeownership,andincomelevels,ontopofthat.Toroundoutmytoolkit,Itookastatisticsclass.

Backinthenewsroom,Iamputtingmynewtoolstowork.Theycomple-menttheshoe-leatherreportingthatisstillthebestpartofmyjob.WhilethedataIcomeupwithmightaccountforonlyacoupleparagraphsinastory,thatinformationelevatesmyreportingbeyondthemerelyanecdotal.That’swhyI’mdeterminedthistimenottoletmyknowledgefadeaway.

John Diedrich, a 2012 Nieman affili-ate, is the federal courts reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Learningtousedatabasesandmappingsoftwarehasitsrewards.ByJoHNDIEDRICH

FEATuRE:CoNTINUING EDUCATIoN

JohnDiedrichusesExceleveryday.Courtesy of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.


HEADER:TITLE

This Land is Their LandBearingwitnesstothefalloutfromtheexploitationofLatinAmerica’snaturalresources

ByGuSTAVoJoNoNoVICH

Latin America’s abundant natural resources are a blessing and a curse. Toooften,foreigncompaniesbenefitwhilecitizenslosetheirhealthandlivelihoods.“Richland,”myongoingdocumentaryproject,isanattempttoshowhowtheexploi-tationoftheregion’snaturalrichesharmspeopleandtheenvironment.

Sincetheearly1990sLatinAmericahasseensignificantgrowthinforeigninvest-mentinminingandagriculture.Landhasbeenopeneduptomultinationalcompa-nieswithfewprotectionsforthepeoplewholiveonit.


PHoToESSAy:GUSTAVo JoNoNoVICH

IbeganthisprojectfouryearsagowithavisittotheBrazilianAmazon,whereagribusinesscompaniesboughtwideswathsoflandtoexpandtheirsoybeanfarmingoperations.Withthehopeofstartinganewlife,manyofthesellersmigratedtothecityofSantarém.Yettheirmoneydidn’tgofar.Manyhadnomarketablejobskillsandfoundthemselveslivinginslums.

ThenextyearItraveledtoLaOroyainthePeruvianAndes.Thistownisconsideredoneofthemostpollutedplacesintheworld.For90yearsthelifeandeconomyofLaOroyahasrevolvedaroundamammothsmelter,nowownedbytheU.S.-basedDoeRunCompany,

oneoftheworld’slargestleadproduc-ers.Thousandsofchildrenhavebeendiagnosedwithleadpoisoning.Itisdifficulttoprovethatpeoplegetsickordieduetoindustrialpollution,buttheconnectionbetweenleadpoisoninginchildrenandirreversiblebraininjuryiswellestablished.

In2010,Idocumentedthedestruc-tionassociatedwithillegalgoldanddiamondmininginVenezuela.Junglesarecleared,anddiamondminersblastmountainswithwaterunderhighpres-sure,wearingthemdowntonothing.

InEcuadorlastyear,myfocuswasoilpollution.Duringthreedecadesofdrill-ingintheAmazon,Texaco(nowpartof

Chevron)dumpedmorethan18billiongallonsoftoxicwastewaterintotherain-forest,pollutingriversandstreamsthatlocalpeopledependonfordrinking,cook-ing,bathingandfishing.Thepopulationhassufferedawaveofcancers,miscar-riagesandbirthdefects.EarlierthisyearanappellatecourtinEcuadororderedChevrontopay$18billionindamagesforpollutingtheAmazonjungle.Whethertheindigenouscommunitieswhoarepar-tiestothesuitwilleverreceiveanyofthatmoneyremainstobeseen.

Gustavo Jononovich, a lifelong resident of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is a freelance photographer.


Ecuador:Previousspread:The300-mile-longTrans-EcuadorianoilPipelineSystemcarriescrudeoilfromtheAmazontothePacificocean.Left:Naturalgasisburnedoffnexttoanoilwell.Above:Eleven-year-oldAnthony,whosuffersfrombirthdefects,walksonhisknees,above.Thepollutedriverisaplacetoplayandbathe.Photos by Gustavo Jononovich.



Venezuela:Adiamondminerusesahigh-pressureblastofwater.yearsofsearchinglikethiswearsawaytherock.


Brazil:LargeareasoftheAmazonhavebeendeforestedtomakewayformoresoybeanfarms.Photos by Gustavo Jononovich.



Peru:AsmokestackrisesoutsideawindowinLaoroya,aleadminingtownthatisoneofthemostpollutedplacesintheworld.Photo by Gustavo Jononovich.


FEATuRE:RICHARD GINGRAS

Over the past 30 years, Richard Gingras’s work has spanned from broadcast teletext services, the earliest version of online news, to his current role as head of news products at Google. As he puts it, he’s been online “since the day of steam-powered modems.”

In a talk at the Nieman Foundation in May, Gingras spoke about the transformations media companies must undergo to thrive online. Edited excerpts appear below; a complete video is available at http://nieman.harvard.edu/Gingras/.

Alwaysreconsideryourcoreassumptions.

Idofeeltheseareextraordinarytimes.Idofeelthatwe,inasense,areinthebeginningsofarenaissancewithregardtojournalism.

Thereasonwhymanyentitiesdon’tsuccessfullymakethetransferenceisthatthey’renotcapableofeatingtheirownyoung,asitwere.

Thecycleofchangeissimplytoorapid.Innovationisnotaluxury;itcan’tbeintermittent.…Ifearthatmanypeoplethinkthatwe’reinthistransitionperiodfromapointofstasistoapointofstasis,andit’sjustnotgoingtobethecase.

Ifthere’sonethingweknowaboutthelinkeconomy,it’sthatapersistentURLbuildsvalueovertimeandanephemeralURLdoesnot.

You’vegotatleastonereporterandatleastoneeditorwhoowneverybeat,everystory.Whydon’ttheyownthattopicpage?Whywouldyouhavearewritepersondothatwhen,frankly,thisshouldbethebestreal-timeexpressionoftheexpertiseofthatreporterandtheexpertiseofthateditor?Andifanything,

it’sthatpagethatshouldspawnwhateverarticlesappearinyourprintedition,nottheotherwayaround.

Transparencyregardingthesource,rightdowntothereporter,ishugelyimportant.Moreimportantthanever.Idobelievethattrustinthisenvironmentisnotsomuchaboutthebrandasitisabouttheindividual.

Havingtherighttopublishdoesn’tmeanthateveryonehastheresponsibilitytolistentoyou.

Ifourobjectiveistocommunicate,ifourobjectiveistoconveyinformation,thenwehavetothinkaboutwhat’stherightformfortherightmediumattherighttime.

WhentheiPadcameout,IcameoutandsaidthatIthoughtitwasafataldistractionformediacompanies.AndIstillthinkthat’strue.…Toomanypublisherswerelookingatit,werelookingatthattablet,andsaying“Ahh,thisishowIcangetmymagazineformatback.ThisishowIcangetbackmyglisten-ingfull-pageadsthatweforcepeopletoclickthrough.ThisishowIcangetbackthatsubscriptionmodel.”Theverynatureofthechangeofasingulardevicedoesnotchangetheecosystemunderit.

Weneedtoevolveourformtomeettheevolutionoftheunderly-ingaudience.IwilldeclareaverymodeststepofvictorywhenIstartseeingnewsarticlesmaybeevenwithbulletpointsinthem.

I’mnotsuggestingthateverythingmustchange,butthatweoweittoourselvesandtotheobjectivesofwhatwewanttodoinjournalismtoreconsidereverythingaswegoforward.

Thebottomlineis,I’vemademoremistakesthananyoneelse.

Anonlinepioneerchallengesmediacompaniestothinkdifferently.

chaos theory


RichardGingras,theheadofnewsproductsatGoogle,says,“Innovationisnotaluxury.”Photo by Lisa Abitbol.

46 Nieman Reports | Summer 2012

Sounding

One lesson we learn young is that there’s a public life and a private narrative, and the two don’t always correlate. Walking to school on dark winter mornings—I grew up in suburban Kansas City, in the kind of neighborhood where you don’t know your neighbors— I was fascinated by how you could see inside people’s windows, but that they couldn’t see you: the dioramas of family life played out in slow succession,

stage-plays of robes and cereal bowls and crankiness, love and boredom and sometimes despair.

In my family, there was one great storyteller, and that was my grandfather. Grandpa O’Grady was always the hero of his own stories, and there was always a very clear narrative trajectory: how wisdom and perseverance—his own— led to triumph over adversity. His stories were set in Chicago during the Great

Depression, and as it turned out, they were largely apocryphal. He was his own fictional character.

I also spent a lot of time in church with my parents, listening to the moral of the story. The family skeptic, I would entertain myself by trying to imagine the thought bubbles over everyone’s heads. Many children are alert to the things that aren’t being said aloud, and this is pretty much the terrain that the novel occupies. In a novel, we can measure the distance between what the characters are thinking, and what they say and do. And if it’s a good novel, there’s a magical leap of faith that happens, and we empathize with them. We feel reassured when we recognize ourselves in their thoughts. And these are people we’ve never met, and who don’t exist.

When I’m asked about what I’m looking for when I confront the pile-up of books at my door, fiction or nonfic-tion, it often comes back to this idea of the thing that’s hiding in plain sight that the author is revealing to us. “Plot” is the book word for fate, and if a story feels too pat, as journalists know, it usually is. For this reason, I’ve always been drawn to counter-narratives. A good novel is, at some level, usually subverting some-thing—often, the nature of storytelling itself. The result is that you feel the urgency in the writing: This is a story that must be told, and it must be told in this way. And however “small” or per-sonal the story, it’s a response to the big story—which is the world we all share at the moment it’s written.

Childhood reading gives us a constellation of literary heroes. Brightly fixed in my own memory are Leo Lionni’s “Frederick,” a phlegmatic poet mouse with no useful labor skills who is ostracized from his mouse community but then redeemed; Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” my first crush; Karana, the heroine of Scott O’Dell’s “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” a Native

Cover StoriesA book critic in praise of the counter-narrative

By Megan O’grady

Vogue contributing editor Megan O’grady, a 2012 nieman Fellow. Photo by Thorsten Trimpop.

Nieman Reports | Summer 2012 47

American girl left behind on one of the Channel Islands for 18 years. She learns to spear fish, tames one of the wild dogs on the island for company, and has a great fashion moment when she makes a skirt out of iridescent cormorant feath-ers. And then there’s the eponymous spider of E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web,” who saves Wilbur the pig from slaughter by making him a tourist attraction. And so, as children, we learn just how power-ful a web words weave; they create glam-our and empathy. They can save lives.

I also read a lot of other things lying around the house that are not

meant for children, as we do. Such as John Updike’s “Couples”: a terrifying substitute for sex ed. And my mother’s magazines: She subscribed to Redbook and Good Housekeeping. Redbook was pretty trashy, and that was my favorite. It had articles with titles like “Would You Marry Him Again?” and diet tips, and then, a recipe for a high-calorie seasonal dessert. I remember my father once caught me reading one of these maga-zines, and he said, “Be careful. If you keep reading those, you’ll get a soft spot in your head.”

Of course, another important reason we read is to feel less alone. I think this was why, for decades, magazines like this flourished—to make housewives feel less alone.

It was sometime in here that I read my first Vogue. They sold it at the supermarket near my house, and it was like a passport to another planet. Even as a 10-year-old I understood that it demanded a different kind of relation-ship with the reader than my mother’s magazines did, and that the images in it represented something idealized, a kind

of fairy tale. But at the same time, it gave me a sense that there was an aesthetic world out there that was, in fact, real.

Book critics tend to agree that there are many paths to the well; the art is in the journey, the detours made, the choice of rest stops and landmarks noted, the lions and tigers and bears encountered en route. But sometimes, the parallels between literature and travel reach beyond the metaphoric to the very rudiments of how a perspective is formed. Sometimes, one simply has to get out of Kansas.

In “Silas Marner,” George Eliot writes of how “minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love” can find happiness in a “new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas. … the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

Most of my travels have been about losing myself in Eliot’s dreamy pres-ent—in Belfast during marching season, in an overcrowded Tijuana orphanage, in a Guatemalan village traumatized and starved by massacre and corruption, in Chile with a Pinochet hangover. But the best place I ever got lost in was Poland: nation as counter-narrative. Obsessed, in my early twenties, with the film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, I deferred gradu-ate school in 1996 and got on a plane, casting myself in my own Polish movie. Teaching English in a grim, formerly German coal-mining town called Gliwice, I witnessed the town’s physical transformation, in a series of renova-tions along the main street—ironically,

or perhaps delusionally, named “Victory Street”—from the ’40s to the ’90s. Of course, psychically, it takes a lot more than a coat of pastel paint.

The poet Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize that same year. Like Kieslowski, Szymborska loved fate and chance connections, the metaphysics of ordinary life, the “chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams and quips,” as she wrote. One of Kieslowski’s later films, “Red,” a love story in which the lovers don’t actually meet until the final frame, was inspired by one of her poems. In Szym-borska’s Nobel speech she spoke about how the work of the poet is to remind us that nothing about life is ordinary. And whether you grew up amid the strip shopping malls of the Midwest or the socialist housing blocks of post-Communist Europe, the banality of that statement only serves the point.

Poles love antihero stories as much as I do. When I was there, a beloved TV series from the ’80s, “Jan Serce,” about a lonely Warsaw sewer worker and his search for romance, was rebroadcast. Sometimes, finding beauty and meaning requires a flashlight.

Vogue is not about democratizing taste. The models are skinny; the clothes are expensive. Our mandate is to choose the best, to tell you what you should be wearing, watching, reading. I’m very lucky to have an editor in chief who is deeply invested in cultural coverage, and books in particular. Books find their way into the magazine as excerpts, reviews and profiles; I’ve interviewed a host of authors, from Jhumpa Lahiri to Jonathan Franzen, trying to get to the self in the story, to the thing that inspires the poetic impulse over other imperatives.

How we choose our cultural heroes is something I’ve given a lot of thought to during my time at the magazine—which voices have authority, what stories garner attention, how certain elements of our

A good novel is, at some level, usually subverting something —often, the nature of storytelling itself.


Books

ryszard Kapuscinski: a Life By Artur DomoslawskiTranslated By Antonia Lloyd-JonesVerso. 464 pages.

A clumsy moment of stonewalling— self-revealing in retrospect—jars an otherwise sleek 2004 documentary about the fabled Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski: When the film’s interviewer asks Kapuscinski,

Secrets and LiesInvestigating a famed Polish journalist By PauL SaLOPeK

accuracy was a hot topic when ryszard Kapuscinski, right, taught journalists at the invitation of gabriel garcía Márquez. Photo courtesy of the Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation.

fractured American identity catch the light. In a series I’ve developed with my editor, Valerie Steiker, called “Lives,” I look at historical women—often a writer sidelined from literary history, like the modernist Djuna Barnes, or someone who isn’t well known in the United States, such as the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova or Brazil’s Kafka, Clarice Lispector—or more famous names—Cleopatra, Gypsy Rose Lee, Edith Wharton, Sarah Bernhardt, Coco Chanel—“icons” or “legends” whose complex-ity and historical importance has blurred. These articles tend to have similar themes: How complicit were these women in the making of their own mythology? And how distant was the reality of their lives?

It’s a dystopic moment in American literature right now— bookstores are crowded with vam-pires and zombies and apocalyptic visions, and on the other hand, there’s a lot of soft nostalgia, a hearkening back to simpler times. For the March issue, I chose a book that confronts the mood head-on without resort-ing to cynicism or naiveté: Lauren Groff ’s “Arcadia,” a novel about the rise and fall of one utopian society. A defense of idealism, it’s a nuanced response to the anger and disaffection that’s behind the Tea Partiers and the Occupy movement. We don’t have to choose between the novel of ideas and the novel of aesthetics, between social relevance and beautiful sentences. The challenge lies instead in the over-whelming clamor for our attention, and the limitations of empathy—not, as it turns out, a new concern. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” Eliot wrote in “Middlemarch” more than a century ago, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Megan O’Grady, a 2012 Nieman Fellow, is a contributing editor at Vogue, where she writes the Books column. She’s on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and lives in New York.


deferentially, about the multiple death sentences he allegedly survived while covering dictatorships and coups in the developing world, the famously mild, self-effacing writer grows defensive. He shakes his head in annoyance. In accented English, he cuts off the ques-tioner. “I am not talking about these problems—never. Never answer these questions,” he mutters. Following an emphatic pause, he adds stiffly, “Next one please.”

Five years after dying from complica-tions of cancer, Kapuscinski remains one of the most celebrated chroniclers of human suffering in our time: a solitary philosopher-reporter who was catapulted to fame by reporting from the world’s danger zones, usually on the shoestring budget of the Polish Press Agency, and who shaped his daily dispatches into books of luminous prose adored by mil-lions, among them literary giants such as John Updike and Salman Rushdie.

But in “Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life,” the journalist Artur Domoslawski strips away Kapuscinski’s mythic Lone Ranger mask. And what emerges beneath is a haunting portrait of a man who felt increasingly oppressed by his legacy—a storyteller compelled by ultimate truths and deep history, yet desperate to shield his readers from manufactured elements of his own past. He died, ill and steeped in dread, still trying. “I will sell you for nothing an idea for the title of your book,” a close friend of Kapuscinski sadly tells the biographer. “ ‘Kapuscinski—the price of greatness.’ ”

TOugh LOVePublished two years ago in Polish, Domoslawski’s book ignited fierce debate in Kapuscinski’s homeland, where the author of “Imperium,” “The Soccer War,” “The Emperor,” “Another Day of Life” and other works of lyrical reportage has been elevated to the status of Journalist of the Century. Yet Domoslawski’s book is a mournful

expos-, and so his revelations are gen-tly rendered. A former acolyte of the famed war correspondent, he describes Kapuscinski’s improbable trajectory from a childhood of genteel poverty in a backwater called Pinsk to the glitter-ing banquet halls of Europe and the Americas with love—albeit a tough love. He locates, for example, evidence

from government files that implicates the young Kapuscinski in intelligence gathering abroad.

Many Eastern Bloc foreign cor-respondents were forced to collaborate with communist regimes during the Cold War. But for Kapuscinski, whose oeuvre returns again and again to ordinary people’s struggles against power, the shame of cooperation was gutting. In Africa, foreign ministry officials assigned him to keep tabs on American compa-nies and agencies. (The Polish embassies’ vaudevillian code for making contact with the journalist was, “Greetings from Zygmunt.” Kapuscinski’s countersign was “Has he sold the car?”) In Latin America the security service handlers knew Kapuscinski by his code name “Vera Cruz.” By then, however, Kapuscin-ski had grown famous enough to push back. He pulled the freelancer’s old trick of recycling articles—in this case, by presenting them as intelligence reports.

An anecdote from the early 1990s, when Poland’s right-wing press was gleefully outing intellectuals compro-mised by the ancien régime, reveals the terrible power of this kept secret. Kapuscinski—by all accounts a gnomish, affable personality—exploded after a cocktail party where a post-communist bureaucrat glibly named Polish diplo-mats he thought had been Soviet agents.

“How dare you, you bastard!” the writer shouted, pinning the startled official to the wall by his lapels.

“I begin to think he was crushed by fear—and not merely of revelations of his cooperation with the intelligence service,” Domoslawski writes of the aging Kapuscinski’s final, anxiety-riddled years. “It was about far more than that.”

He is referring, of course, to Kapuscinski’s controversial habit of conflating journalism and literature.

Kapuscinski himself often described his reporting method as creative: He insisted he wrote to the “essence of the matter.” Domoslawski records him explaining to a colleague how tinker-ing with the sequence of real events is acceptable because it “sometimes helps to convey a deeper meaning. It all depends how it is done, and whether it sits within the particular realities, within the climate, or whether it is artificial, invented, deceptive.”

This type of literary reportage, Kapus-cinski’s defenders have always noted, is rooted in an Eastern European tradition that used allegory to navigate around the culture of censorship prevalent behind the Iron Curtain. To be fair, Kapuscinski’s text does brim with dreamlike imagery that clearly signals the imagination at work. An old Indian inexplicably cranks an antique gramophone in the middle of a Mexican desert. Or the inhabitants of a Siberian town stagger about in a frozen fog, leaving discernible tunnels through it. His books never include disclaimers.

Meanwhile, during his three years of research, Domoslawski unearths more fictions that have little to do with art.

It appears that Kapuscinski trans-ferred his “magical realism” to the pages

It appears that Kapuscinski transferred his ‘magical realism’ to the pages of his own life.


BOOKS

ed Kennedy’s War: V-e day, Censorship & The associated PressEdited By Julia Kennedy CochranLouisiana State University Press. 201 pages.

It should have been the apex of his illustrious career. But in some ways, it was the beginning of the end for Edward Kennedy.

The “scoop of the century”—Kennedy’s exclusive May 7, 1945 report on Germany’s unconditional surrender and the end of World War II in Europe—commanded front pages and radio reports around the world. It triggered celebrations everywhere.

But Kennedy, then Paris bureau chief for The Associated Press (AP), was swiftly suspended and months later quietly let go.

He stood accused by the Allied military of breaking an agreed-upon embargo, thereby causing a security risk.

His colleagues who had agreed to the embargo accused him of the biggest double-cross in journalistic history.

Kennedy stood tall against the charges all of his life. He contended that he had never put any life at risk nor had he double-crossed anyone. Instead, he said, he had done his duty as a journalist: He had stood up against political censorship.

Now we have his posthumously published memoir explaining it all in cool detail, how he did it, why he did it and why, finally—after all these years—the AP was moved to issue an apology this past May. Instead of standing up for a reporter who had performed to the highest jour-nalistic standards, his bosses at the AP not only abandoned him, they fired him.

“It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way,” said Tom Curley, the agency’s president and chief executive officer, in making the apology. Kennedy, he concluded, had done “everything just right.”

The former foreign correspondent ended his days with his pride and journalistic principles intact, putting out a small, high-quality newspaper in Monterey, California.

Already suffering from cancer, he died in 1963 after being hit by a car. He went out doing what he loved to do.

“We can sell these pieces of dead trees only by creating the illusion that they are alive,” he wrote in his final editorial. “This we attempt to do, with varying degrees of success, by headlines that grip the eye and written material that clutches the heart and soul of man.”

Kennedy was attempting to do just that when, after six long years of war in Europe, the military was trying to muzzle the media—not for security reasons, but for politics.

News that would grip the very heart and soul of a world yearning for peace was being withheld.

deaL BreaKerThe powers in Washington and London wanted to delay the announcement of war’s end for 36 hours to allow the Soviet Union to stage its own signing ceremony in Berlin and make people in its sphere of influence believe that it had delivered the death blow to Nazism, with contribu-tions from other, lesser parties.

But Kennedy brought his signature alertness, sound judgment, and con-siderable spine to do what every good reporter should have done that day.

The Fight of His LifeEd Kennedy paid a high price for spreading news of the war’s end. By BiLL SChiLLer

of his own life. Traveling in the great wanderer’s footsteps, Domoslawski finds eyewitnesses who contradict several famous Kapuscinski-ian incidents of derring-do. It’s unlikely, he concludes, that Kapuscinski faced death by firing squads in Africa or South America, as his book jacket blurbs assert. (Hence, perhaps, his evasiveness in the documentary.) Kapuscinski also appears to have grossly exaggerated his friendships with leftist liberation icons such as Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, or Patrice Lumumba. He may have never met them at all.

Domoslawski defers to a former New York Times correspondent who knew Kapuscinski to sum up such mythomania: “As the years went by, he became a member of the intel-ligentsia … but he came from a poor background, from the provinces, from ignorance,” said the late Michael T. Kaufman. “He had to make a super-human effort and do some incredible work on himself to get to the top, to reach the position he achieved at the end of his life.”

Burdened by his self-made legend, Kapuscinski died planning one more improbable journey, to the islands of Oceania, a place he had never been.

Was it an escape? His last note-book entries, written after he was hooked up to a feeding tube, still hold the master’s trademark beauty, and can be read, as the best Kapuscinski always will be, on multiple levels. “A terrible feeling of helplessness, I’m losing touch with the world, with the light, with my surroundings, with reality, it’s all drifting away, disappearing.”

Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent. While on fellowship at the Nieman Foundation, he researched an around-the-world journey he’ll make on foot to tell the story of human migration out of Africa 50,000 years ago.


BOOKS

Kennedy had learned that while he and 16 other correspondents had agreed not to report the surrender they had witnessed at General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters until given the green light, a German radio station in Allied-occupied territory had broad-cast the news—with Allied approval.

The embargo broken, the news out, Kennedy approached the military, de- manding an explanation. Getting none, he paused to consider, then moved swiftly.

He called a colleague in the AP’s London office and told him the news: “Germany has surrendered uncondition-ally. That’s surrendered unconditionally. That’s official. Make the date Reims, France, and get it out.”

He dictated about 300 words before the connection broke. Then he turned to his colleagues and said, “Well, now let’s see what happens.”

All hell broke loose. The AP was bullied by the military, its operations in the European Theater shut down, and it quickly backed down—even before it had obtained the facts from its own reporter.

Military leaders weren’t the only ones to condemn Kennedy. The New York Times, which had used Kennedy’s story on its front page with multi-stacked headlines announcing the end of the war, also attacked him, decrying Kennedy’s report as a “grave disservice to the news-paper profession.”

It was, of course, no such thing. It was one of the AP’s and American journal-ism’s finest moments and might well have saved lives.

“The war was over; there was no mili-tary security involved, and the people had a right to know,” Kennedy told reporters when he landed in New York on June 4.

As his memoir recounts in telling detail, Kennedy knew the difference between censorship for political reasons and censorship for security concerns. As an AP correspondent for a decade, he had traveled across war zones in Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and Europe, and had operated regularly under the mili-tary censor’s blue pen.

But after careful consideration, he knew that military security was not involved. He and his colleagues had been hoodwinked for political purposes.

Today, in an age when government manipulation of information appears to be growing, when the shameful spinning of tales like those about soldiers Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch are wrought from whole cloth, we need inspirational

stories like Edward Kennedy’s more than ever.

As Kennedy reminds us, truth need not be the first casualty in war, nor the last.

All journalists owe Edward Kennedy a debt for distinguished journalism under fire.

Bill Schiller, a 2006 Nieman Fellow, is a foreign affairs writer for the Toronto Star.

ed Kennedy, center, and an unidentified aP staffer react to the bombing at anzio beachhead in 1944. Photo courtesy of Louisiana State University Press.

In his waning years, broadcast pioneer Mike Wallace declined screen-writer and filmmaker Peter Rader’s request to be interviewed for his biog-raphy, “Mike Wallace: A Life.” It’s prob-ably just as well. Rader meticulously researched Wallace’s unique life in and out of broadcast journalism and he has crafted a narrative that is both engag-ing and revealing, though some readers may be put off by his admission that he wrote some “imagined dialogue.” The book exposes many shortcomings and weaknesses that the great interrogator zeroed in on in others but never wanted to confront himself.

In the days and weeks immediately following Wallace’s death, it was easy to watch the highlight reels of his career and feel a warm glow, but it’s much harder to confront his character flaws off camera. He put his career ahead of fam-ily and friends. He could be cruel and sexist to women in the workplace. He was at times consumed with self-pity.

The retrospectives and obituaries are reminders of his unique contributions to broadcast journalism, but this biography takes Wallace away from the glowing screen and puts him on the couch. It was not easy to work with him. It was not easy to be married to him. It was not easy to be his child. It was not easy to be him.

Mike Wallace’s resonant voice, his jet-black hair, his demeanor at once prickly and endearing, make him seem—in retrospect—born for broad-cast. What is less well known is how

Wallace learned to use his voice as a skinny Jewish kid in Brookline, Massachusetts to compensate for pro-found insecurity about his pockmarked face and overbearing mother. Decades later, he famously reduced Barbra Streisand to tears on camera over the very same insecurities he instinctively recognized from his own experience.

He didn’t gain admission to the University of Michigan without a good word from his friendly uncle, Leo Scharfman, who was on the faculty. Wallace later left a legacy there by donating Wallace House, home of the Knight-Wallace journalism fellows. He learned the real power of his voice at the campus radio station and later at WOOD/WASH radio (twin call letters because a furniture company owned half of the station and a laundry the other half ). His early days in broadcast-ing were less than glamorous. He once shoveled elephant dung to clear the stage for the live broadcast of WGN’s “Super Circus” in Chicago.

His first marriage was to his college sweetheart, Norma Kaphan. He wasn’t ready. He went off to war in a noncom-bat role in the South Pacific and was absent when his oldest child developed tuberculosis. Norma enlisted a family physician to prevail on the U.S. Navy to send him home. But the military was a temporary absence. Wallace’s career made for a more prolonged absence in the lives of his sons, Peter and Chris. The book details how Norma’s second hus-band, CBS executive William Leonard,

encouraged Wallace to be a part of the boys’ lives and welcomed his presence. It led to a renewed relationship.

Wallace’s own life was profoundly altered when Peter died as a young man from a fall while hiking in Greece in 1962. The loss made him rethink his career choices. He focused more than ever on journalism. It’s easy to see how his career could have continued as pitch-man and game show host. But he was driven to produce more substantial and lasting work.

Wallace was married four times in all. He was not a philanderer, but this book chronicles in some detail how he seemed more comfortable with the enduring marriage to his vocation, his calling, his voice. He recognized it as a character flaw. He also did not give up on mar-riage, his final in 1986 was to Mary Yates, the widow of his former producer and good friend Ted Yates. Two years earlier she literally saved his life when she rescued him from an overdose of pills. Wallace later spoke frequently and freely about his own depression. He spoke less often of the failed suicide attempt. He left a note, which, Rader writes, “… befitting Mike, was rather impersonal—relating to financial matters rather than his feelings.” What is glaringly apparent from the rest of this book is that had his suicide attempt been successful, Wallace would have missed the opportunity to make peace with himself and his loved ones and the world would have been cheated of more decades of tremendous reporting.

Wallace’s prickly, challenging persona on “60 Minutes” meshed perfectly with public skepticism after Vietnam and Watergate and the exponential growth of television as a news medium. He spoke up for the voiceless. And that voice said, “Aw c’mon!” The phrase that Wallace chose to apply to himself may be applied to Peter Rader’s fine book: “Tough, but fair.”

Stuart Watson, a 2008 Nieman Fellow, is an investigative reporter at WCNC-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina.


BOOKS

Mr. DifficultThe personal turmoil lurking beneath the tough exterior By STuarT WaTSOn

Mike Wallace: a Life By Peter RaderSt. Martin’s Press. 323 pages.


1942 Thomas Sancton, a Southern journalist who wrote articles in the 1940s advocating for racial justice, died at a nursing home in New Orleans on April 6th. He was 97.

A graduate of Tulane University, Sancton began his career reporting for The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune before joining The Associated Press and moving to New York. During his Nieman year he married Seta, who died in 2007, and left Cambridge early to become man-aging editor of The New Republic, a post that gave him a platform for his views on racial justice.

His essays and editorials denouncing segregation pro-voked outrage in some quarters, and a Mississippi congressman denounced him on the floor of the House of Representa-tives, an outburst that Sancton considered a badge of honor. His role as an early crusader for civil rights earned him a place in books such as The Library of America anthology “Reporting Civil Rights” and John Egerton’s “Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South.”

Sancton was Washington editor for The Nation before returning to New Orleans. During nine years as a feature writer for The New Orleans Item, he wrote two novels set in Louisiana, “Count Roller Skates,” later reissued as “The Magnificent Rascal,” in 1956, and “By Starlight” in 1960. Neither was the financial success he had hoped for but his first novel was optioned this year for a movie.

While at the Item, he also taught feature writing at Tulane. Among his students was John Kennedy Toole, author of “A Confederacy of Dunces.” Some of his students became so devoted to him that they held annual reunions at his house. One stu-dent told Sancton’s son, Thomas A. Sancton, a former foreign correspondent for Time maga-zine, that the class was like “one big church service, something to worship and treasure for life.”

In addition to his son, Sancton is survived by two daughters, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and one great-great-grandchild.

1966robert a. Caro’s fourth volume about President Lyndon Johnson, “The Passage of Power,” was published on May 1 by Knopf.

Covering the years 1958 to 1964, the book examines Johnson’s frustration about giving up the power he wielded as Senate majority leader to become vice president, his ascendency to the presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the burst of legis-lation that laid the groundwork for Johnson’s Great Society.

Caro has twice won the

Pulitzer Prize for Biography: in 1975 for “The Power Broker,” about New York City planner Robert Moses, and in 2003 for “Master of the Senate,” the third volume in his “Years of Lyndon Johnson” series.

In a profile in The New York Times Magazine in April, Caro recalled a pivotal moment during his Nieman year. His class on land use and urban planning was discussing how traffic and population density determined where highways got built, and Caro thought to himself, “This is completely wrong. This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don’t find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.”

Bob giles has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The 220 members elected this year will be inducted at a ceremony in October at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joining Giles in the class of 2012 are Boston Globe editor Marty Baron and television journalist Judy Woodruff. The former cura-

tor of the Nieman Foundation, Giles is now commentary editor for GlobalPost.

1969Mike Mcgrady, a longtime reporter and critic for Newsday best known as the mastermind of a ribald literary spoof, died of pneumonia on May 13th in Shelton, Washington. He was 78.

Published in the summer of 1969, “Naked Came the Stranger” was conceived by McGrady as a commentary on the declining tastes of American readers. The novel would offer little in the way of plot or style as it followed in graphic detail a suburban woman’s sexual conquests in the wake of her husband’s affair.

McGrady wrote the first chapter and drafted colleagues at Newsday to finish the book. “As one of Newsday’s truly outstanding literary talents, you are hereby officially invited to become the co-author of a best-selling novel,” McGrady wrote in his pitch to them. “There will be an unremitting emphasis on sex. Also, true excellence in writing will be quickly blue-penciled into oblivion.”

The project was delayed by McGrady’s reporting trip to

Thomas Sancton Mike Mcgrady

nieman notes

Vietnam and his Nieman year, during which he and his co-edi-tor, Newsday colleague Harvey Aronson, mailed chapters back and forth. “We found out that it’s very difficult to write badly,” Aronson said.

The book credited Penelope Ashe, a “demure Long Island housewife,” as its author, and McGrady had his sister-in-law play the role for public appear-ances. But after “Naked” sold 20,000 copies in the first few weeks after publication, the journalists revealed themselves as its creators. According to Aronson, the revelation created such a sensation that he and McGrady were picked up by helicopter for an interview on “CBS Evening News.”

Before McGrady’s journalism was overshadowed by “Naked,” the New York City native covered the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War as a reporter and columnist for Newsday, where he worked until 1991. After John Steinbeck, writing in Newsday, called for other American writers to come to Vietnam and see the war for themselves, McGrady convinced the paper to send him in 1967. His columns from Vietnam were honored with an award from the Overseas Press Club for best interpretation of foreign affairs, and they were republished as a book called “A Dove in Vietnam.” Later he was a film critic and restaurant reviewer.

McGrady wrote a number of novels and nonfiction books, including “Stranger Than Naked: Or, How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit” and “The Kitchen Sink Papers: My Life as a House Husband.” He also was the co-author of two memoirs by “Deep Throat” star Linda Lovelace.

He is survived by his wife, Corinne, two sons, a daughter, and five grandchildren.

1971daniel rapoport, a longtime Washington journalist, died at his home in East Chatham, New York on April 11th after a long battle with leukemia. He was 79.

Born in New York City, Rapoport moved to Washington, D.C. in 1959 after graduating from the University of Illinois and serving in the Navy. He joined United Press International and was covering the House of Representatives at the time of his fellowship appointment.

His longstanding interests ranged from prizefighting and the inaccuracy of lie detectors to the number of lions shipped to Rome to engage in Coliseum battles, according to Nieman classmate John Pekkanen, who called Rapoport “the kindest and most gregarious man I’ve ever known.”

After leaving UPI, Rapoport wrote “Inside the House: An Irreverent Guided Tour Through the House of Representatives, From the Days of Adam Clayton Powell to Those of Peter Rodino,” published by Follett in 1975. He also wrote for National Journal and Washingtonian magazine.

In 1983 he founded Farragut Publishing, which had early suc-cess with a series of cookbooks co-written by his wife, Maxine. “He was a natural innovator,” said a Farragut colleague, Merideth Menken. “He offered profit-sharing agreements to Farragut authors and created partnerships with those who needed Farragut’s experience to ‘package’ books under their own imprints, a forerunner of today’s self-publishing movement.”

From 1984 to 1996, Farragut put out 20 nonfiction titles. “As a publisher, Dan was willing and able to follow his own instincts and interests. Farragut was like nothing before or since,” said Paul Dickson, co-author of “Baseball: The Presidents’ Game,” a Farragut book. Other titles included “On This Spot: Pinpointing the Past in Washington, D.C.,” and “Grand Allusions: A Lively Guide to Those Terms, Expressions and References You Ought to Know But Might Not,” which was reissued as “Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions.”

In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children and one grandchild.

1974Patricia O’Brien’s sixth novel, “The Dressmaker,” was pub-lished by Doubleday in February under the pseudonym Kate Alcott.

It tells the story of Tess, a passenger on the Titanic who is an aspiring seamstress work-ing for a famous designer. She survives the disaster only to be caught up in the media frenzy that followed.

Simon & Schuster rejected the manuscript due to poor sales for O’Brien’s previous novel, “Harriet and Isabella,” which

it had published. Twelve other publishers also turned it down. After her agent suggested using a pen name, it sold in three days. The critically acclaimed “Dressmaker” has spent several weeks on The New York Times extended bestseller list.

1983guy gugliotta’s book “Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War” was published in February by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The book, his second, focuses on three men who influenced the design and construction of the building: Union Army Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, the lead engineer; architect Thomas U. Walter; and Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Gugliotta, who covered Congress during a 16-year career at The Washington Post, is now a freelance science writer.

William Marimow returned as editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer at the beginning of May.

He ran the paper from 2006 to 2010 when he was reassigned to the investigative reporting team. He left the paper in 2011 to head the Carnegie-Knight News21 digital journalism


nieMan nOTeS

daniel rapoport

program at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

In a press release announcing the move, Marimow said, “It will be a privilege to work alongside newsroom colleagues who have continued to produce great journalism despite the toughest economic conditions I’ve ever experienced.”

Marimow’s return was announced just days after the sale of Philadelphia Media Network, which controls the Inquirer as well as the Philadelphia Daily News and their joint website Philly.com, to local investors.

1984Bert Lindler was named a hero of conservation in the April issue of Field & Stream magazine.

For the past seven years Lindler has been a volunteer caretaker for a herd of 470 elk that winter on the outskirts of Missoula, Montana. He has worked with conservation groups, state agencies, local ranchers, and homeowners to control weeds and modify fences so the elk can find food and move across the land.

Lindler was a reporter for the European edition of Stars

and Stripes and the Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune before becoming a technical editor for the United States Forest Service. He retired in 2010 and now describes himself as the “North Hills Elk, Bear and Weed Volunteer.”

1986roberto eisenmann received a lifetime achievement award from the Fundación Fórum de Periodistas por las Libertades de Expresión e Información (Journalist’s Forum for Freedom of Expression and Information Foundation) in Panama.

Eisenmann, the retired founder of the daily newspaper La Prensa who was exiled from Panama during the Noriega regime, was honored for his long commitment to journalists’ rights.

This is the 16th year that the foundation has given the awards. A panel of eight inter-national journalists, including Cecilia alvear, NF ‘89, an inde-pendent multimedia journalist, made the selections.

Mark ethridge wrote the screen-play for the independent film “Deadline,” which premiered in February and has been screened in a number of cities across the

United States. It was released on DVD and other formats in July.

The film is based on his 2006 novel “Grievances,” which was in turn based on a case that Ethridge covered while working at The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer in 1970. While the essence of the film—a rich white Northerner brings attention to the unsolved murder of a black man—is true to the facts, many details were changed. “The story’s not factual,” he said, “but it is true.”

Ethridge’s second novel, “Fallout,” was published in February by NewSouth Books. It’s what he calls “an ‘Old Man and the Sea’ kind of story,” about an editor at a weekly newspaper who stumbles onto a big story.

To promote “Deadline,” the filmmakers teamed up with newspapers to host screenings in 45 cities, with all of the profits going to local nonprofits, such as the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C. and VOX, a group that supports teen journalists in Atlanta.

“The movie has a very posi-tive message about journalists and journalism,” Ethridge said.

1987Valerie hyman conducted a three-week training program

this past fall at the National Broadcasting Corporation in Kyrgyzstan, at the request of the American Embassy. The longtime broadcast journalist said it “was an extraordinary opportunity to influence and train both journalists and executives at the center of the country’s emerging democ-racy. I taught how to question authorities, find stories, and give voice to people who have been quieted for so long.”

Sabine rollberg was commissioning editor of the documentary “Sofia’s Last Ambulance,” which received the France 4 Visionary Award at the 51st La Semaine de la Critique (“Critic’s Week”) during the Cannes Film Festival in May. The film, directed by Ilian Metev, follows a team of paramedics in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, where 13 ambulances serve a population of nearly 2 million. It was produced in part by German broadcaster WDR, where Rollberg is a commissioning editor.

1989norman robinson will receive a 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Press Club of New Orleans.

A longtime broadcast journalist who is a news anchor at WDSU-TV in New Orleans, Robinson will be recognized at the organization’s 54th annual Excellence in Journalism Awards in July. In addition to New Orleans, he has worked for broadcast outlets in Southern California, New York, and Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the White House Press Corps as a correspondent for CBS News.


roberto eisenmannWilliam Marimow Mark ethridge

U.S. FeLLowS:David Abel, staff writer at The Boston globe, plans to study the evolution of new media, the impact of rising income inequal-ity on the social fabric, and the science as well as the potential effects of climate change.

Brett Anderson, restaurant critic and features writer at The Times-Picayune in new Orleans, will study the forces and people

fueling the modern american food culture and their impact on the way americans eat.

Chris Arnold, national corre-spondent at nPr, will study the reshaping of the government’s role in housing after the collapse of the bubble and how the crash will shape the future of home ownership. he is the donald W. reynolds nieman Fellow in Business Journalism.

Alexandra Garcia, video journalist at The Washington Post, will study interactive sto-rytelling forms and how news organizations can create visual experiences that engage users.

Jeneen Interlandi, a science and health journalist based in new Jersey, will study the history of pharmaceuticals, the cultural forces that shaped people’s rela-tionships to medication, and the impact that has had on percep-tions of illness and health.

Blair Kamin, architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, will seek to re-examine and revitalize the field of architectural criticism in print and online. he is the arts and Culture nieman Fellow.

Jennifer B. McDonald, an edi-tor at The new york Times Book review, will study canonical works of literature and philoso-phy and the historical role of the critic in culture.

Betsy o’Donovan, a freelance writer and editor for The herald-Sun in durham, north Carolina, will study entrepreneurial mod-

els for community newsrooms. She is the donald W. reynolds nieman Fellow in Community Journalism.

Mary Beth Sheridan, a news editor at The Washington Post, plans to study international politics and economics, with a focus on countries, particularly those in Latin america, moving from authoritarian to demo-cratic systems.

Jane Spencer, international editor at large for newsweek and The daily Beast, will study digital tools for narrative story-telling, with an emphasis on how emerging technologies can be used to improve news cover-age of global women’s issues.

Laura wides-Muñoz, his-panic affairs writer for The associated Press, will study the nexus between immigration and economics. She will exam-ine how the global financial crisis affects the integration of immigrants into u.S. society and how the data can be presented in dynamic ways on multimedia


nieMan nOTeS: NEW FELLOWS

Blair Kamin Jennifer B. Mcdonald Betsy O’donovan Jane SpencerMary Beth Sheridan Laura Wides-Muñoz

In THe 75TH CLASS, A new FeLLowSHIp TAKeS AIM AT InnovATIon

Laura norton amico Borja echevarría de la gándara

david abel alexandra garciaChris arnold Jeneen interlandi

The 75th class of nieman Fellows includes two members named to a new fellowship designed to generate ideas to advance quality journalism in the digital age.

The nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism innovation is a collaboration between the nieman Foundation for Journalism and harvard’s Berkman Center for internet & Society. Laura norton Amico, founder and editor of homicide Watch in Washington, d.C., and Borja echevarría de la Gándara (Spain), deputy managing editor of el País in Madrid, will be full participants in both the nieman and Berkman fellowship communities.

amico will study criminal justice journalism in the digital age, focusing on best practices and new models for reporting on crime and courts. echevarría will study the structural evolution of newsrooms, look for patterns among successful newsrooms, and determine if the practices of digital start-ups can be applied effectively in established newsrooms.


Jin dengLee Chong-ae yaakov KatzLudovic BlecherKarim Ben Khelifa Katrin Bennhold

platforms. She is the Louis Stark nieman Fellow.

InTernATIonAL FeLLowS:Karim Ben Khelifa (Tunisia/Belgium), photojournalist and founder of emphas.is, will conduct research on journalist-audience engagement, analyze the behavioral economics linked to crowdfunding, and study new business models promoting the diversification of visual story-telling. he is the Carroll Binder nieman Fellow.

Katrin Bennhold (germany), London-based reporter for the international herald Tribune, will study the economics of gender and motherhood and explore the barriers to and costs of gender equality in the early 21st century. She is the William Montalbano (nF ’70) nieman Fellow.

Ludovic Blecher (France), executive director and editor in chief of Liberation.fr, will study online media business models and explore ways to monetize high-value journalism. he is the robert Waldo ruhl nieman Fellow.

Lee Chong-ae (Korea), senior

reporter, Seoul Broadcasting System, will study journalism related to complex trauma, focusing on people who have experienced the effects of periods of colonialism, war and military-influenced dictatorial administrations followed by rapid economic growth. her fel-lowship is sponsored by The asia Foundation.

Jin Deng (China), senior edi-tor, Southern Weekly, will study how the democratization and fragmentation of information in the social media era will affect journalism, society and politics in China. her fellowship is sup-ported through Sovereign Bank and the Marco Polo Program of Banco Santander.

Yaakov Katz (israel/united States), military reporter, The Jerusalem Post, will study the use of censorship in the digital age, especially in coverage of israel and the Middle east.

Souad Mekhennet (germany/ Morocco), a reporter and col-umnist for The new york Times, der Spiegel, and ZdF (german TV), will study how the arab Spring influenced the long-term

strategies of terrorist organiza-tions such as al-Qaeda and how islamic law deals with human rights, women and democracy. She is the Barry Bingham, Jr. nieman Fellow.

paula Molina (Chile), anchor and editor at radio Cooperativa, will explore opportunities the digital revolution has created for better development, sharing and distribution of broadcast news.

Finbarr o’reilly (Canada), africa-based photographer for reuters, will focus on under-standing how the human mind and behavior are affected by what happens in trauma and conflict zones. he is the ruth Cowan nash nieman Fellow.

Beauregard Tromp (South africa), senior field producer, enews africa, will study how the purchase of large tracts of land in africa by countries and global corporations may affect trade agreements, govern-ments and local communities concerned about possible exploi-tation under a “new colonial-ism.” his fellowship is supported by the nieman Society of Southern africa.

San Truong (a k a huy duc) (Vietnam), a freelance journalist based in ho Chi Minh City, will study public policy, american literature, and the history of Vietnam, to sharpen his work as a political analyst. he is the atsuko Chiba (nF ’68) nieman Fellow.

in addition to Ann Marie Lipinski, nF ’90, curator of the nieman Foundation, the selection committees for the 2013 class included Steven Bloomfield, executive direc-tor of harvard’s Weatherhead Center for international affairs; Colin Maclay, managing director of harvard’s Berkman Center for internet & Society; Jack Megan, director of harvard’s Office for the arts; George de Lama, nF ’92, nieman advisory Board member and president of global development at answers Media LLC; journalist Dave Denison, nF ’90; Alicia Anstead, nF ’08, editor in chief of inside arts magazine; Stefanie Friedhoff, nF ’01, special projects manager for the nieman Foundation; and Joshua Benton, nF ’08, director of the nieman Journalism Lab.

Finbarr O’reillySouad Mekhennet Beauregard TrompPaula Molina San Truong


Joseph Thloloe received the Order of Ikhamanga silver medal from South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma in April.

He was one of 31 people honored with national orders on Freedom Day, the anniversary of the country’s first democratic elections.

The Order of Ikhamanga recognizes South Africans who have excelled in the fields of arts, culture, literature, music, journalism and sport. Thloloe, a veteran of South African journalism who is currently serving as the country’s press ombudsman, was cited for his contributions to the struggle against apartheid and his role shaping the post-apartheid media.

The relationship between the government and the press has been strained of late, with Zuma’s African National Congress party proposing a media appeals tribunal and a Protection of State Information Bill that many journalists view as a form of censorship.

Thloloe said it is “a measure of the maturity of our democ-racy that they overlooked our differences and gave this award. It bodes well for our democracy.”

1990yossi Melman has joined the Israeli news website Walla after 27 years with the daily newspa-per Haaretz. He will continue writing about security and intelligence matters.

His self-published book “Spies Against Armageddon,” co-written with CBS News reporter Dan Raviv, will be available in July on Amazon.com. It is an unofficial history of the Israeli intelligence community from 1948 to today.

He also recently published “Running: An Autobiography” in Hebrew. In the memoir he reflects on his life as a Polish boy who moved to Israel with his parents and how that history influenced him to start running marathons at age 43.

1991 Kevin noblet completed his term as president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) at the end of 2011.

“Past presidents warned me it was a lot of work, and it was,” he says. “But business news is now front-page news and SABEW’s work has never been more important.”

1994 Melanie Sill has been named executive editor of Southern California Public Radio, a network of three stations. The former editor of The Sacramento Bee and The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer, she is overseeing the newsgathering operation across online and broadcast platforms. She previously spent six months as executive-in-residence at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism, where she

wrote the discussion paper “The Case for Open Journalism Now.”

Larry Tye has written “Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero,” published in June by Random House. The book looks not just at the Man of Steel character but at the creators, designers, owners and performers who made him a cultural icon. Tye, who has written biographies of baseball pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige and Edward L. Bernays, the father of public relations, grew up reading Superman comics and watching nearly all 104 episodes of “Adventures of Superman” on TV. He writes in the acknowledgements that the idea for the book “came from the place so many good things do for me, my wife, Lisa.”

1996Laura eggertson has been awarded the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Journalism. A freelance journal-ist based in Ottawa, Eggertson plans to write about suicide among aboriginal communities in Canada. She plans to produce a series of articles in print and online and a radio documentary.

The fellowship, given annually by the Michener Awards Foundation, provides funding for a reporter pursuing an investigative project that serves the public interest.

1998Julia Keller will join the faculty at Ohio University this fall, teaching writing in the journal-ism department. She had been the cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune.

“It’s been an extraordinary journey for me,” Keller told Time Out Chicago about her tenure at the Tribune, where she had worked since 1998. “I was given the chance to write about anything and everything, from a long series on traumatic brain injury to a series on the aftermath of the Utica, Illinois, tornado. … Not too shabby for a kid from Huntington, West Virginia.”

Keller has taught at a number of universities and written three books, including “A Killing in the Hills,” which is being published by St. Martin’s Press in August. It’s a mystery set in her home state about a mother and daughter with a strained relationship who have to work together to solve a bizarre murder.

Keller won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her stories about the Utica tornado.

2004Santiago Lyon has been pro-moted at The Associated Press. He is now a vice president in addition to continuing as direc-tor of photography, a position he has held since December 2003. He says that he will continue “to be involved in working closely with AP Images,

nieMan nOTeS: PRIZES

Joseph Thloloe

BInGHAM prIze For InveSTIGATIve JoUrnALISM

A centerpiece clock tower that was lop-sided. A rooftop track and field rendered unusable by design flaws. A feeding trough set too high for the pig to reach. From major to mundane, construction flaws plagued the $5.7 billion program that Los Angeles voters authorized to rebuild the city’s community colleges. But after reporters Gale Holland and Michael Finnegan spent 18 months investigat-ing for their Los Angeles Times series “Billions to Spend,” it became clear that the real story wasn’t the flaws, but the corruption, greed and hubris that had created them.

In April the series received the Nie-man Foundation’s 2011 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism. Prize judge Walter Robinson, formerly a long-time Boston Globe investigative reporter, called it “a stark reminder of the impor-tance of the watchdog role the press plays when government spends scarce public funds. This was an important public works project whose biggest beneficiaries should have been working class com-munity college students,” Robinson said. “Instead, the funds were used to award lucrative contracts to politically con-nected companies, with lax oversight.”

Edited excerpts of the reporters’ discussion at the ceremony follow; a full version is available at http://nieman.harvard.edu/2011Bingham/.

gale holland: I’m a higher education reporter, and I got a tip that the elected trustees of the college system had fired the chancellor because he opposed these outlandish renewable energy projects. Meanwhile Michael [Finnegan], who’s a political reporter, got a tip that a newly renovated theater was going to be torn

down, and a new one built, just because they had enough money to do it. We met with our editors, and the conclusion was that the elected trustees were basically invisible in L.A., allowing them to spend $5.7 billion in the dark of night, without any oversight. So they set us loose to take a comprehensive look at the program.

We went about trying to get the public records that would detail exactly what the construction problems were and exactly how much they cost. Our focus was to be very specific and to rely on public records, but for a year they gave us nothing. Finally, we had the bright idea of asking for the e-mail between the public officials and these contractors, architects and construc-tion managers. When it arrived, in the attachments were all of the reports we had been seeking—all the engineering reports, and even a confidential legal settlement. So we put it all in a file and called it “Nirvana,” because it was everything we needed.

E-mail was really a mother lode for our project. They delivered a lot of the e-mail in an Outlook format so it was word-searchable, which saved us tons of organizational work. It set up the chronology of when and how things hap-pened. And more importantly, it created a narrative, because this e-mail was all architects, contractors and managers arguing over what went wrong, and whose fault was it, and accusations back and forth, so we had more of a story, with human beings talking, and we didn’t have to rely just on the public records reports to document the problems.

We discovered that there were secre-taries and PR people who were on the payrolls of shell companies that were owned and run by big campaign donors for the district. They were charging very fat markups, ostensibly to cover their business overhead and a small amount of profit. In one example, the district was paying about $300,000 for somebody who was writing press releases, but that

Los angeles Times reporters gale holland and Michael Finnegan constructed a narrative of the corruption they discovered by piecing together e-mails they obtained. Photos by Brooks Canaday.


Every year the Nieman Foundation awards a portfolio of prizes. The winners of three major awards were celebrated this spring.


nieMan nOTeS: PRIZES

employee himself only made about $65,000. The rest of it went to these layers of private companies. That particular employee happened to be a nephew of one of the college trustees.

Michael Finnegan: My first job was reporting in New Jersey and New York, where I had done some inves-tigative work and some political work. So my assumption when we couldn’t get questions answered was that something must be wrong here, somebody must be on the take. Los Angeles is largely a Democratic Party town where environmentally friendly programs are kind of a given, and it wasn’t unheard of for contracts to go to people as political favors in the green energy world.

It turned out, though, that it was not a standard story of public officials ripping off the public. It was a much more interesting story. It was about Larry Eisenberg, who was in charge of the program. It was about his ego, partly. He fashioned himself to be the Robert Moses of green construction in California.

Eisenberg spent two, three, four, five hours with us, trying to explain what they were doing, putting up these solar panels and windmills all over the campuses. Somehow they were going to generate so much electricity that they would no longer have to pay power bills, and the power costs would go down to noth-ing. Something didn’t add up though, because renewable energy is more expensive than the traditional kind.

For us, it didn’t matter how con-voluted and detailed this was, any-thing—the construction of a rocket ship, say—could be explained if you just took enough time to listen to the people who were explaining how it was done. They couldn’t do it—it was Alice in Wonderland. Finally, after he said, “Part of the plan is such-and-such,” I just asked him: “What plan?”

Of course, there was no plan.

TAYLor AwArD For FAIrneSS

To say that the subject of reporter J. Andrew Curliss’s “Twisted Truth” series was difficult is putting it mildly. Tracey Cline, the district attorney of Durham, North Carolina, repeatedly battled Curl-iss and his paper, The News & Observer in Raleigh, over the investigation.

The three-part series is the 2011 win-ner of the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers. Speaking about it, judge Tyler Bridges, NF ’12, said “what especially stood out for me was how the newspaper handled Cline’s attempts to discredit its work and that of its reporter ... The paper’s editors demon-strated considerable fairness when Cline cast the paper in the difficult role of hav-ing to report on her attacks against it.” She has since been removed from office.

Nieman Reports’s Jonathan Seitz spoke with Curliss after the award ceremony. Edited excerpts of their conversation fol-low; a longer version is available online at http://nieman.harvard.edu/Curliss/.

Jonathan Seitz: What led you to the “Twisted Truth” investigation?J. Andrew Curliss: It was me sitting in the courtroom, paying attention. There was a hearing where the D.A. ended up

on the stand and was asked a series of questions and clearly did not handle the questions well. My paper was the only one who covered that hearing, but on the same floor, basically across the hall, the news media for the entire region were covering a murder trial. If everybody else was sitting in the same courtroom, would they have seen what I did and decide to go look? Who knows. But part of doing good work, in my view, is seeing things happen. It’s not just sources and records and all of that.

I was covering that hearing as part of my follow-up to another series my paper had done. I could have just wrote the story, “Oh, here’s the case. It got dismissed.” But as I was sitting there and seeing what I witnessed, my mindset was “God, there’s more to this,” you know? And the “more to it” was about the D.A.

What are your go-to techniques for interviewing?When I’m interviewing somebody, I’m thinking about two things. One is, what-ever I’m asking them about, how might I describe it in the paper? Let’s say that I’m going to describe some fund as a slush fund, right? Well, if I’m going to write the words “slush fund” in the newspaper, I want to make sure that I say that in the interview. I want to ask them, “Is this a slush fund?” The other is that I’m trying to listen. I think a lot of times we can just get so focused on, “I’ve got this list of questions I’ve got to get through, one to 10,” and you don’t really listen to the answers. Maybe you’re on question three, and it could lead you in a whole new direction—if you were just listening.

The other thing I’m trying to do—I’ll just be honest here: I’m trying to shut up. I tape a lot of my interviews and I go back and I’m listening to it and I’m just, like, “Would you just shut up?” You know? And so—that’s one of the things that I’m really trying to do: ask short questions, and then be quiet.

When J. andrew Curliss investigated a district attorney, she attacked his work and his paper. Photo by Lisa Abitbol.


J. AnTHonY LUKAS BooK prIzeS

J. Anthony Lukas’s “Common Ground” was a model and inspiration to Daniel J. Sharfstein, winner of this year’s J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.

Sharfstein’s “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White” tells the story of blacks who over the centuries have passed as whites. Largely by mining online databases, he found enough details to spin a narrative about three black families who passed as white.

A professor at Vanderbilt University, Sharfstein recalled that he became enamored with “Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families” in the late 1980s after his brother returned home from college, clutching it “as if it were a sacred text.” He said Lukas’s book has long influenced his thinking “about the complexities of race in the United States and the possibili-ties for telling stories about how we see ourselves and order our worlds.”

The Lukas prize is one of three admin-istered jointly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation as the Lukas Prize Project Awards. In remarks at the awards ceremony in May, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the journalism school, said Lukas

had been a “close friend and hero” of his. ann Marie Lipinski, NF ’90, curator of the Nieman Foundation, said her Nieman class had had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with J. anthony Lukas, NF ’69.

“Common Sense: A Political His-tory” by Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor at University of Virginia, is this year’s winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize. The judges praised the book as an “extraordinary, wide-ranging and original work” that shows how central common sense is to the “evolution of our modern understanding of politics.”

The Work-in-Progress Award went to Jonathan M. Katz for his book, “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster” to be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

In January 2010, Katz, then a cor-respondent for The Associated Press, was on his computer upstairs at his home outside Port-au-Prince when he heard what he thought was the rumbling of a passing truck. “What we were hearing was the first shockwave coming from the epicenter [of the earthquake],” he said.

The awards were established to honor the late Lukas by recognizing excellence in narrative nonfiction books.

From left, prize winners daniel J. Sharfstein, Jonathan M. Katz, and Sophia rosenfeld. Jonathan alter, right, is chairman of the J. anthony Lukas Prize Project Committee. Photo by Lisa Abitbol.

how do you go about recreating the particulars of a case? As a case goes up through the appeals process, things can get distilled, and in the distillation, there can be distortion. And so, as much as pos-sible, I tried to rely on the actual trial transcripts.

What happens is that one side is arguing their point really hard, and the other side is arguing their point really hard, and sometimes the appeals court just adopts one side of it—when it’s more nuanced than that. You might think in a court story like this that it’s like, “Oh wow! This is all just sitting there in the court records.” Well, I wish it were that easy. You can’t just ask, “Oh, can I pull the file for the cases where the prosecutor’s work was questioned?” I mean, that’s the work, and there is no central file for that.

you told the district attorney early on that she was the focus of your investi-gation and shared your findings with her. is that how you always operate?Yeah, on a story like that, I think it’s helpful to try to get to the focus of the story as early as possible—“as possible” being the key words. I mean, you have to know what you want to ask them. But part of being fair is giving the person a chance to properly explain himself or herself. This notion of just showing up at the courthouse on Friday before a story’s going to run on Sunday and catching them where they can’t really explain their position—I just don’t think that’s the right way to do it. I don’t want to catch them; I want their best.

And I want their best because that’s what gets you to the truth. When you’re balancing the value of “Ooh, I caught them in a moment and they couldn’t explain this” or “I surprised them,” the surprise factor, to me, doesn’t outweigh the fairness factor. I guess that’s the bottom line.

AP’s photo licensing arm, to grow AP’s photo business, as well as ongoing cross-format leadership activities in AP’s news department.”

Lyon has been with the AP since 1991, when he joined as a photographer based in Cairo.

2007 eliza griswold has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The journalist and poet plans to spend her fellowship year work-ing on three projects: a collec-tion of poems to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013, a book based on a New York

Times Magazine story she wrote about poetry in Afghanistan, and a book about the fall of manmade America and the nation’s collective pov-erty. The fellowships, awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, provide funding to writers, scholars and scientists to work on projects of their choosing.

Kondwani Munthali was named Malawi’s Blogger of the Year by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) during its World Press Freedom Day celebrations in May.

This is the first year that MISA has given the award, with financial support from the U.S. Embassy. The recipi-ent was selected by a vote of journalists who are members of the organization. “I am proud that my peers, who form the majority of my critics, thought this was the best out of my Motherland Malawi,” Munthali wrote in a blog post after the announcement.

When Munthali started blog-ging during his Nieman year, he mainly posted his opinions on issues ranging from global health to youth empowerment programs. Recently he has focused more on news, and he has occasionally faced harsh criticism and reprisals for his writing, especially during the political turmoil in Malawi over the past two years, he said in an interview posted on Global Voices Online.

2009Kael alford’s photographs from Louisiana are featured at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work is part of the “Picturing the South” exhibit on display until September. A companion book, “Bottom of da Boot,” has been published by Fall Line Press. She has spent the last five years documenting the

effects of erosion on Louisiana, especially in the wake of Hur-ricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill, as part of a commission from the museum.

According to Alford, “Like the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, what is being lost on the coast of Louisiana is more than a neighborhood or a storm buffer. It’s a piece of our collective memory and a unique piece of heritage that defines us as a nation.”

hannah allam joined McClatchy’s Washington, D.C. bureau on July 1st, covering foreign affairs as part of the national security reporting team.

For the past nine years, Allam has worked for McClatchy in the Middle East, serving as bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo. She gave birth to a son, Bilal, while covering the Iraq War. In a


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Kondwani Munthali Kael alford

Anja niedringhaus, nF ’07, won first place in a spot news photography category of the national headliner awards. “Shot down” shows a Libyan warplane moments before it crashed to the ground. niedringhaus works for The associated Press. hannah allam

eliza griswoldSantiago Lyon

Facebook posting announcing her new position, Allam said that her time abroad was “exhilarat-ing,” but that she’s “excited about the new beat, the chance for Bilal to be closer to his grand- mas and cousins, and the pros-pect of an occasional day off.”

david Jackson and colleague Gary Marx at the Chicago Tribune won the 2011 Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for their series, “Across the Border, Beyond the Law,” about how flaws in the justice system allow fugitives to leave the United States and evade the law. Their series identified dozens of criminals from Chicago, including a priest charged with sexual assault, who had fled the country.

The Medill Medal is awarded annually by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism to the individual or team of journalists “who best displayed moral, ethical or physi-cal courage in the pursuit of a story or series of stories.”

“In their work, Marx and Jackson blend old-fashioned reporting shoe-leather, exhaus-tive public records searches and fierce courage in confront-ing international fugitives on their home turfs,” said Medill Professor Donna Leff, who led the judging. “The reporters wandered in areas known for harboring drug cartels that rule by assassination and kidnapping and through their fearless work, showed how the Justice Depart-ment, county prosecutors and local police could have found these fugitives from justice.”

On an 18-day trip to Mexico, the two reporters found eight of the nine fugitives they were seek-ing. Two agreed to interviews.

The series was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Tommy Tomlinson has been hired to write for a joint venture of USA Today Sports Media Group and Major League Baseball Advanced Media. The partnership plans to launch a website this summer. He’ll be writing about all sports, with an emphasis on college football.

Tomlinson spent the last 23 years at The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, where he has been a local columnist since 1997. In his final column, he wrote, “When I decided to leave the Observer, I had two main reasons: I’d never been part of something that was starting from the ground up, and I didn’t want to be an old man sitting on my porch wondering,“What if I had tried that?.”

2010Lisa Mullins received a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation. Mullins was recognized as an outstanding anchor in the news/news magazine category for her work on Public Radio Interna-tional’s “The World,” which she has anchored since 1998.

2011hui Sui Fun’s “Misjudged Cases” was one of two documentaries from Hong Kong-based TVB Jade Channel that received a 2011 Peabody Award. Her documen-tary focuses on unjust arrests and prosecutions.

The George Foster Peabody Awards are given annually by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication to honor excellence in television, radio and the Web.

gary Knight’s photographs are featured in the new book “Questions Without Answers: The World in Pictures by the Photographers of VII,” a retro-spective of work by members of photo agency VII.

His photo essays are “Evidence: War Crimes in Kosovo,” in which he takes a forensic approach to photo-graphing the former Yugoslavia after the indictment of Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic; “The Bridge,” about one of the first major assaults of the Iraq war; and “Amongst the Poor,” which grew out of Knight’s journeys through India over a two-year period.

Knight is director of the Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice at Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership.

2012Carlotta gall has been signed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to write a book about what the publisher calls “America’s long occupation of Afghanistan, from 9/11 to the present, a Vietnam-esque tragedy that leaves behind a country in turmoil.” Gall, a reporter for The New York Times, has been based in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001.


Tommy Tomlinson

Lisa Mullins

hui Sui Fun

david Jackson

Kristen Lombardi was part of the Center for Public Integrity/ NPR investigation, “Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities,” that won the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Online Journalism.

The series looked at hun-dreds of cities across the US where efforts to clean up air pollution have fallen far short of expectations. More than 20 years after clean air legislation was passed, many communities are still exposed to chemicals that can cause cancer and other health problems.

SPJ judges said the series “fully utilizes the tenets of online journalism to uncover an important issue. The in-depth stories, photography and video give readers an immersive experience on what it feels like to live near a company that is on the EPA’s watch list. … Upon its publication, the EPA posted data on its website. One state cracked down on a polluter. Other media caught on to the story and published their own pieces and reaction to the work.”

Lombardi has been on staff at the Center for Public Integrity

since 2007. She won the 2009 Sigma Delta Chi award in the same category for “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrat-ing Search for Justice.”

raquel rutledge and her affili-ate John diedrich were part of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel team that won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Investigative Reporting for “A Case of Shat-tered Trust.” The series also won first place in the investigative category of the Association of Health Care Journalists’ (AHCJ) Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism and a 2012 Ger-ald Loeb Award for excellence in business reporting.

In the paper’s investigation, contaminated alcohol wipes emerged as the suspected cul-

prit behind illnesses and deaths in hospitals, including that of 2-year-old Harrison Kothari. The reporters discovered that for a decade a Wisconsin firm had frequently violated federal rules for making sterile products, but the U.S. Food and Drug Adminis-tration had taken little action.

“While the FOI effort alone could constitute a first-place award, the reporting was humanized and made intensely relevant when the writers intro-duced us to the Kothari family’s loss,” the AHCJ judges said. “Overall, this effort exemplifies best practices in multimedia storytelling, with graphics, compelling photos, and rivet-ing video. This will become a hallmark for how to accomplish public service reporting.”

Pir Zubair Shah has been named the 2012-2013 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The fellowship provides an opportunity for a foreign correspondent or editor to focus on sustained analysis of events abroad. Shah, who has reported for The New York Times in Pakistan, intends to work on what he calls a “politically rel-evant memoir of growing up in Pakistan.” The book will examine the nation’s past and present in an effort to predict its future.

To submit a note about a new job, project or award, please reach us at [email protected] or Nieman Reports, One Francis Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138.


Seattle Times investigative reporter Ken armstrong, NF ’01, and Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, NF ’96, have won journalism’s most prestigious award.

Schmich won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “her wide range of down-to-earth columns that reflect the

character and capture the culture of her famed city.” Her subjects ranged from the personal to the political, from crime to the installation of a cringe-worthy statue of Marilyn Monroe.

After the announcement, Schmich, who had been a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 for feature writing as well as last year

for commentary, wrote about how she got started as a columnist 20 years ago and what she has learned since:

“On a chilly afternoon in the April I arrived, I sat in a Coffee Chicago with a yellow pad … . I wrote down things like: Go out. Get to know people. Introduce Chicago people to each other. Make

pulitzer prizes for Two niemans

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raquel rutledge Pir Zubair ShahKristen Lombardi


‘MeTHADone AnD THe poLITICS oF pAIn’The Seattle Times series by Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong, NF ’01, that won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting began under the headline: “State Pushes Drug That Saves Money, Costs Lives.” Among the chilling facts in the three-part series was that California has more than five times the population of Washington, but fewer methadone deaths. The excerpt below lays out the problem:

Map the deaths and you see the story. Assign a dot to each person who has died in Washington by accidentally overdosing on methadone, a commonly prescribed drug used to treat chronic pain. Since 2003, there are 2,173 of these dots. That alone is striking, a graphic illustration of an ongoing epidemic.

But it’s the clusters that pop out—the concentration of dots in places with lower incomes. Everett, whose residents earn less than the state average, has 99 dots. Bellevue, with more people and more money, has eight. Working-class Port Angeles has 40 dots. Mercer Island, upscale and more populous, has none. For the past eight years Washing-ton has steered people with state-subsidized health care—Medicaid patients, injured work-

ers, and state employees—to methadone, a narcotic with two notable characteristics. The drug is cheap. The drug is unpredictable.

The state highlights the former and down- plays the latter, cutting its costs while refus-ing to own up to the consequences, according to a Seattle Times investigation that includes computerized analysis of death certificates, hospitalization records, and poverty data.

Methadone belongs to a class of narcotic painkillers, called opioids, that includes Oxy-Contin, fentanyl and morphine. Within that group, methadone accounts for less than 10 percent of the drugs prescribed—but more than half of the deaths, The Times found.

Methadone works wonders for some patients, relieving chronic pain from throb-bing backs to inflamed joints. But the drug’s unique properties make it unforgiving and sometimes lethal.

Most painkillers, such as OxyContin, dissipate from the body within hours. Methadone can linger for days, pooling to a toxic reservoir that depresses the respiratory system. With little warning, patients fall asleep and don’t wake up. Doctors call it the silent death.

Seattle Times reporter Ken armstrong is congratulated in the newsroom on the day the 2012 Pulitzers were announced. Photo by Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times.

the city visible. Make it feel like a small town. Stories! … After that, one story at a time, I began to make sense of this amazing, chaotic place. It was like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle, one you can never get entirely assembled because pieces keep vanishing and new pieces keep turning up.”

Armstrong and fellow reporter Michael J. Berens’s series “Metha-done and the Politics of Pain” was one of two winners in the investiga-tive reporting category. The prize was given “for their investigation of how a little known governmental body in Washington State moved vulnerable patients from safer pain-control medication to methadone, a cheaper but more dangerous drug, coverage that prompted statewide health warnings.”

A week after the series was pub-lished in December 2011, the state announced that it would issue an emergency public-health advisory to more than 1,000 pharmacists and about 17,000 licensed health care professionals, warning of the risks associated with taking metha-done. In January the state went further, instructing physicians to treat methadone as a drug of last resort.

The series also won the Selden Ring Award and an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) award.

The reporters announced that they would donate their $10,000 Pulitzer Prize to provide IRE training to their colleagues at The Seattle Times. “We just wanted to find a way to do something for the paper and something for IRE,” Armstrong said. “IRE, more than any other organization you can think of, is the group that people turn to when they want to learn this craft and they want to be inspired. And to me, those two things are equally important.”

—Jonathan Seitz


wrITInG Her HeArT oUTBy Mary SChMiCh

This column by Mary Schmich, NF ’96, who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, appeared in the Chicago Tribune on August 7, 2011 under the headline “Troubled daughter grows up.”

My sister Gina received her first cellphone as a birthday gift a few days ago.

Until recently, Gina had insisted that a cellphone was too complicated for her, a plausible statement given how many things she finds hard.

For years, she found bathing complicated, so she rarely stepped into a tub or shower. Brushing her teeth felt complicated, so her teeth went bad. Cleaning her room felt like climbing a mountain, so her room devolved into a jungle of junk with a skinny path to the unmade bed. In the final weeks of her old cat’s life, she found it too complicated to pick up the cat feces on the carpet, so she neatly laid a paper towel over each set of droppings.

When Gina was little, doctors said she had an IQ of 34, and though they were far wrong, the right diagnosis has never been clear. Mild autism. Borderline personality disorder. The verdict seems to have changed almost as often as her medications.

What is clear is that Gina is different, so she always lived with our mother and our mother lived with the question: What will happen to Gina when I die?

Gina worried too. As Mama grew frail, Gina often climbed in her bed in the middle of the night to weep.

“Honey,” my mother would soothe her, “you’ll be OK,” and my siblings and I, unconvinced, told our mother we’d make sure she was.

In the months leading up to my mother’s death, Gina began to change. She calmed down, some. She took pride in making Mother’s morning coffee. When one of my brothers or I bathed our mother, Gina held the towels. When we’d lift Mother off the portable commode next to the sofa where she slept, Gina was quick to say, “I’ll empty it.”

But after Mama died, we braced for Gina’s familiar rages. We talked about how to handle her when she burst into shrieks at the memorial.

On the morning of the service, she found me while I washed my face.

“Do you think,” she began. “Do you think it would be OK if I don’t go? I just. I just think the best way for me to honor Mom today is to take a shower and brush my teeth and go out on the bus.”

And that’s what she did.With clean hair, in new brown capris and

shin-high socks from Target, she rode the bus from store to store that day, along a route she rides for hours almost every day just for fun. She visited with clerks and pharmacists she considers her best friends, telling them her mom was gone.

“Mom would be proud of me for being independent,” she said when she got back.

In the year since, Gina has lived alone, next to one of our brothers. She has given

up soft drinks, after years of a dozen a day. She has gone to the dentist, and her teeth, minus several that had to be pulled, are white again.

She showers.And now, thanks to two brothers, she is a

modern woman with a cellphone. I called her on it last week.

“I’m doing a lot of things I never thought I’d be doing,” she said with a big laugh. “Living alone! And a cellphone!”

I try to understand my sister’s transfor-mation, to trust that it will last. It’s one of the most mysterious and beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed, though maybe it’s no more complex than this:

When your greatest fear comes to pass and you survive, you discover who you really are.

Reprinted with permission from Chicago Tribune; copyright Chicago Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich on the day it was announced that she had won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Photo by Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune/via The Associated Press.


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Does your daily newspaper offer romance novels on the side? How about an interactive evening edition for the iPad?

As media innovation increasingly targets an on-demand culture, these were among the projects that attracted interest at the 13th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ), where hundreds of journalists, media executives, and academics gathered in April to exchange research and ideas about disruptions in journalism and global reactions to them.

The conference, hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, reliably draws a mix of professional news producers and high-level researchers. In addition to the continuing need for innovation and entrepreneurialism, many of this year’s speakers empha-sized the importance of addressing the challenges presented by the rise of mobile devices.

e-BOOKSWhen it comes to finding opportunities for revenue, the atti-tude increasingly is “why not?” That’s the case at the Inquirer Group, one of the largest media companies in the Philippines, where JV Rufino heads the mobile and books group.

His group has tried a number of approaches in its foray into e-books, including publishing collections of what had already appeared in the print newspaper—like a three-part investiga-tive series that examined the failed promises of a fund estab-lished to help coconut farmers.

But some of the other genres that the newspaper com-pany went with for its e-books may surprise you. At Easter, it released a collection of prayers that had been published over time on the front page of the community newspaper Inquirer Libre. It also offered a Tagalog romance novel that had been serialized in another Inquirer newspaper.

The Inquirer Group also published books—this time in physical as well as electronic formats—about the Supreme Court’s decision-making process.

eVening ediTiOnPedro Doria, digital platforms editor of O Globo, a national newspaper based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, wowed ISOJ with a demonstration of his newspaper’s evening-edition iPad app. One feature layered 300-year-old paintings of Brazil on top

of contemporary photographs of the same settings. With the swipe of a finger, users could reveal the modern photo that cor-responded to an old painting.

Doria said the paper saw engagement with its tablet app skyrocket after it introduced the edition earlier this year. O Globo found that the amount of time people spent using the app jumped from an average of 26 minutes a day to 77 minutes a day.

One key factor, Doria said, is that the company assembled a team dedicated to building something “not for the Web, not for the newspaper—for the tablet.” The mentality at O Globo, he said, is that great journalism should be distributed wherever it fits best, and that no single channel—print, television, tablets, smartphones—should inherently trump another.

MOBiLe neTWOrKSIn some cases, people connecting to the Internet for the first time are doing so through mobile devices. That’s true in parts of Africa where those who missed the shift to desktop Internet access are now getting connected via phones. This development holds great promise for expanding access to news, but it also carries a risk.

Harry Dugmore, a mobile communication expert who teaches at Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies in South Africa, is behind a project called Iindaba Ziyafika, which promotes the use of mobile phones for “interac-tive journalism.” It encourages citizens to send information to media outlets via text message and is working to develop methods of distributing news directly to cell phones.

At ISOJ, Dugmore talked about the enormous importance of mobile networks in delivering news to consumers in Africa. Yet these networks have a down side. They tend to be centralized and they’re often under government control.

In nations that lack press protections, the architecture of mobile networks raises security risks for those who rely on them. As the global population shifts toward phones and tab-lets, innovation in the arena of mobile security will be critical to promoting freedom of speech and of the press.

Adrienne LaFrance is a staff writer for the Nieman Journalism Lab.

And You Thought Your newsroom was InnovativeAcross the globe, journalists are finding new ways to deliver diverse content to an increasingly mobile audience. By adrienne LaFranCe


heard aT LiPPMann hOuSe

out of His Comfort zoneBuzz Bissinger on ambition, fear of failure, and the genesis of ‘Friday Night Lights’

The 2012 fellowship year ended on a bittersweet note this spring when narrative nonfiction legend Buzz Bissinger, NF ’86, came home to Lippmann House to talk about his new book, “Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son.”

“The Nieman year was probably the most special year of my life,” he told fellows, who moments later would have their closing barbecue. “The intimacy, the stimulation … people say, ‘Why’d you begin to write books?’ The reason I really began to write books is that after my Nieman year I felt I owed it to myself to go and do something out of the box, and really, really do

something different, not simply go back to my paper with the sort of glow of a great year. So that’s what I did.”

Bissinger of course went on to write the iconic “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” a narrative about high school football in Texas, and other acclaimed books. “Father’s Day,” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is about a cross-country road trip with one of his twin sons, Zach, a 24-year-old savant.

In conversation with curator Ann Marie Lipinski, NF ’90, who was his editor at the Chicago Tribune, Bissinger talked about books, newspapers and the best possible attitude for an outgoing Nieman. What follows is an edited excerpt:

I get excited about a lot of ideas and I just let them sit. I get a sort of pulsating feeling in my heart, my chest—this excitement. And if the excitement lingered that meant I was onto something.

I had a passion and a feeling in my heart that [“Friday Night Lights”] was the right book for me to do. And then I got lucky.

As my father says, “You have to be close to be lucky.”

As a journalist, all I ever do is try to get people to be honest about themselves and open up. I felt, well if I’m gonna turn the light on myself I have to be honest, because I think there’s purity in honesty. I think that’s where you learn about people.

Did [“Father’s Day”] change me? Did the trip change me? I don’t think it did.

I’m still ambitious. I’m still frantic the book will be a failure and if it’s a success it won’t be as big a success as I anticipated. But it did make me feel closer to Zach.

What was great about journalism when I entered it, which was right after Watergate, in 1976, papers were hot, papers were making money, but beyond that they all wanted investigative reporting, they all wanted long-form reporting.

After your Nieman year you owe it to yourself to do something different. Even if you’re going back to your own paper, do some-thing different. Do a different beat. Write a book. Whatever. Just do something different.

“�The�key�to�reporting�is�to�zig��while�everyone�else�zags.”

—Buzz BissiNgeR

read the transcript of Buzz’s visit at www.niemanstoryboard.org, along with an excerpt from “Father’s Day.”

in This issue

Nieman ReportsOne Francis AvenueCambridge, Massachusetts 02138

iN This issueCover storiesBy megan O’Grady

Photo essay: This land is Their landBy Gustavo Jononovich

Chaos TheoryBy richard Gingras

Pluslinda greenhouse on ‘he said, she said’ JournalismRyszard Kapuscinski’s secret lifeed Kennedy’s Firing offense

nr summer 2012

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